Covid-19 inquiry latest: Urgent work needed to rebuild trust in vaccines after pandemic, ministers warned – UK Times

Today’s inquiry found the maximum payout for those left injured by the Covid jab should be be increased in line with inflation to at least £200,000.

Lawyers representing those who were harmed by the vaccine have called also called for improvements to the government’s Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, which currently award £120,000 to victims/

Sarah Moore, who is representing 48 claimants, said: “The Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, in its current form, fails to provide timely or adequate support to those who have been seriously injured or bereaved due to vaccine side effects.”

Solicitor Terry Wilcox from Hudgell Solicitors, which represents a number of vaccine injured groups, said people who have been harmed or died “deserve acknowledgment of the impact on their lives, which for many has been life-changing illness and loss of loved ones, and changes made to ensure they are properly supported, and that lessons are learned for the future”.

In the Covid inquiry’s third report published last month, it concluded that the UK’s healthcare systems “came close to collapse”.

The report examined the impact of Covid on healthcare systems across the UK and investigated “how governments and society responded to the pandemic, the capacity of healthcare systems to adapt and the impact on patients, their loved ones and healthcare workers.”

It found “that the UK entered the pandemic ill-prepared. Healthcare systems were already overstretched and in a precarious state. This fragility had profound consequences once the crisis hit, especially when the numbers of people seeking treatment for Covid-19 started to increase dramatically.

“Healthcare systems were overwhelmed and came close to collapse. Despite the best efforts of healthcare workers, many Covid patients did not receive the care they would otherwise receive and non Covid patients had their diagnoses and treatment delayed. For some this meant their condition became inoperable. Healthcare workers put their lives at risk and the pandemic had a significant and long-lasting impact on their mental health and wellbeing.”

Three main vaccines were used in the UK – the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines.

Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines both used what is called mRNA technology; mRNA, or messenger ribonucleic acid, is a component of all life on earth and works as the mechanism by which our genes can be used to make specific proteins in our cells.

When used in vaccines, mRNA delivers the instructions for making a harmless piece of protein identical to one found in a particular virus or bacterium, to the ‘protein factories’ of our cells, according to the UKHSA.

Our immune system then recognises it as a foreign body and starts to produce antibodies that can attack the protein if it encounters it again in the form of the ‘real’ virus.

UKHSA explains that these types of vaccines are different from other types because they present our immune system with something to mount a response to, while some vaccines may contain the whole virus or bacterium (providing lots of different antigens), and some contain selected parts of the virus or bacterium (a more specific antigen).

mRNA vaccines are different as they provide the instructions for our bodies to produce the parts of the virus within our own cells. mRNA vaccines have the potential to be more rapidly tailored to different diseases or different variants of a disease by changing the mRNA.

This technology is now being trialled for diseases such as cancer, where it can be more easily personalised to target the unique profile of the cancer for each individual patient.

Although largely a success, the Covid-19 vaccine programme received various criticisms at the time, including advice to pregnant women.

One criticism centred on the lack of clarity over whether pregnant women should get the vaccine.

Some 27 of the 45 women who died from Covid during 2019-21 were unvaccinated, according to a report from researchers at Oxford University’s MBRRACE team.

As pregnant women were not included in clinical trials for Covid-19 vaccines, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency concluded at the time of authorisation in December and January 2020 that there were not sufficient data to give reassurance of safe use of the vaccine in pregnant women.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency authorised the use of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines – Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna – for pregnant women and, on 16 April 2021, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation advised that all pregnant women should receive a vaccine.

In early 2020, scientists across the world were desperately searching for a new drug or treatment for Covid as the virus continued to spread.

The government deployed a Vaccine Task Force in the UK to find the most promising vaccines and pre-order them for speedy deployment once approved by regulators.

In November that year, Pfizer/BioNTech announced that its Covid-19 vaccine was both safe and effective, with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine also announced to be effective just days later.

Grandmother Margaret Keenan, then 90, became the first person in the world to be given a Covid-19 jab outside of a clinical trial when she received the Pfizer vaccine in Coventry.

The NHS began rapidly administering vaccines, prioritising the most vulnerable in society.

Thousands of vaccination sites were set up across the UK including in football stadiums, shopping malls and cathedrals. Clinics operated 24 hours a day to get people vaccinated as quickly as possible.

More than 184 million Covid vaccinations have been administered in England, according to the NHS.

Out of the millions given Covid-19 vaccines, around 22,000 people in the UK have raised claims over harms linked to the vaccines, most relating to the AstraZeneca vaccines.

The three-year investigation into his death, carried out by consultancy Facere Melius, found Suffolk GP Federation was forced to expand the number of people receiving the AstraZeneca jab amid fears over vaccine wastage at the height of the pandemic.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that by December 2022, there were 59 deaths registered involving Covid-19 vaccine adverse side effects – 51 of which recorded the vaccine as the underlying cause of death.

Analysis of deaths by the Office for National Statistics in March 2023 found increased mortality risks for women following the non-mRNA vaccine, AstraZeneca, at the time.

However, the report found greater mortality risks for people who test positive for Covid-19, and the risk was higher than that of those who were unvaccinated at the time of testing.

Kate Scott, whose husband Jamie was left permanently disabled after having a reaction to the vaccine, says their family are “the luckiest unlucky people”.

Mr Scott, an IT engineer, received the AstraZeneca jab in April 2021.

After ten days, the then 44 year old woke with a headache, vomiting and impaired speech and was taken to hospital by ambulance where he had multiple operations to treat a blood clot in his brain, Mrs Scott, who gave evidence to the Covid inquiry, said.

The father-of-two boys was in a coma for four weeks and now lives with side effects including impaired speech, reduced cognition, memory and processing deficits, visual difficulties, concentration difficulties and fatigue.

He has received a Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS) payment based on the balance of probabilities that the vaccine caused his injuries.

“He is a warrior,” his wife said. “I often say we are the luckiest unlucky people. He survived.

“He wasn’t supposed to – I was called in four or five times to be told that he wouldn’t make it through the night.

“We are incredibly lucky that he is alive and he is able to be in our lives with the children and have moments of joy.

“But it is very, very difficult. The lasting brain damage is the size of a credit card.

“He had to relearn to walk, talk, eat, communicate.

“He’s got a hidden disability of brain damage, processing issues, he has lost peripheral vision in both eyes, he can’t split and divide his attention, he has got chronic fatigue.

“He has had over 300 medical appointments and just navigating life with a brain injury is difficult.”

The Covid-19 inquiry was an ‘incredible feat’ of covid vaccine programme, hailed as largely a ‘success story, saving over 450,000 lives.

The UK’s response to the pandemic saw an unprecedented vaccine programme, larger than any before, to roll out Covid-19 jabs across the country.

On 8 December 2020, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan received a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at University Hospital in Coventry, which was the first type used, followed by Oxford AstraZeneca on 30 December 2020, and Moderna on 8 January 2021.

Led by the NHS, in its first 6 months, the programme delivered 57,844,499 doses, and in 12 months, 99,870,280 doses and by the end of June 2022, 125,686,871 doses had been administered.

The logistics of rapidly setting up and rolling out this programme cannot be underestimated. It led to large Covid-19 vaccine centres being rolled out across the UK, including buildings such as theatres and sports grounds, while the NHS also recruited thousands of volunteers and former healthcare staff.

Lessons learned from the Covid-19 vaccine programme could arguably be seen in the recent rapid scaling up of meningitis vaccines to student in Kent following a major outbreak.

Sheila Ward had to make faced the impossible decision of turning off her husband’s life support machine just 11 days after he received a Covid-19 jab.

Her husband, Stephen Ward, had been rushed to hospital 10 days after getting the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine in 2021.

The 57 year old from Newcastle-Under-Lyme had signs of a stroke including problems with his speech and limb weakness.

Mr Ward, who had worked for the Co-op for four decades, had developed a blood clot and medics battled to save his life. But the next day his family was told the bleed was too severe for him to survive and a decision was made to turn off his life support.

Mrs Ward had to wait for almost a year for a coroner to confirm that his death was a “result of complications of medical vaccination”.

She said: “Stephen was one of those people who would help anybody do anything.

“If your car wouldn’t start in the morning he would help you, if you were unwell he would mow your grass, he was just one of those community-minded people.

“We had both had Covid back in the November before the vaccines were rolled out, so from our point of view there was no urgency to take the vaccine.

“It was just the obvious choice really – to take the vaccine to protect loves ones, and like everyone else we wanted to get back to normal.”

The Independent’s Health Correspondent Rebecca Thomas reports:

In the rush of the vaccine programme, the then Conservative government attempted to make the Covid-19 vaccines mandatory for all NHS staff.

The government had planned to introduce new regulations making Covid-19 vaccinations a condition for working in healthcare. At the time, a government analysis had predicted 73,000 NHS workers and 35,000 care workers would not have had their Covid-19 jab by the time mandatory vaccines came into force on 1 April 2022.

In November 2021, the regulations came into force for care workers. However, the move to apply this to the NHS also prompted huge backlash and eventually the government U-turned months later in January 2022.

The decision to drop the mandate was announced just three days before the deadline for NHS staff in January and the then health and social care secretary, Sajid Javid, said that the balance of opportunities and risks of the policy had shifted with the dominance of the omicron variant, with the population being as a whole better protected against the need for hospital admission, and with omicron being “intrinsically less severe” than delta.