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SINGAPORE – It’s not new that vaccines have no-fault compensation and compensation mechanisms to protect both individuals and businesses, while allowing millions of people access to vaccines.
It appears this will also apply to Covid-19 vaccines, with Pfizer getting compensation from the British government against any incidents as countries around the world begin to insure the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for their people.
Singapore Pharmaceutical Industries Association President Ashish Pal said in a Straits Times Reset webinar, The AZ of Covid-19 Vaccine, on Thursday (December 17) that this is not new for vaccines.
“You really want to get to a point where you have a very, very efficient use of your resources (people and dollars) so that vaccines are actually delivered and populations start to acquire immunity. To do this, you need to look at two established mechanisms: compensation. and no-fault compensation, “he said.
No-fault compensation schemes are used when accidents and injuries are deemed unavoidable, and the emphasis is on compensating victims for related expenses, without anyone having to enter the civil justice system and prove another party is liable. of the damages.
“Indemnification clauses protect governments, distributors, administrators, and providers, and no-fault compensation mechanisms protect patients. So you want to create an environment where people feel protected and empowered to go ahead and apply. a vaccine and get the vaccine administered, “he explained.
Associate Professor Lim Poh Lian, director of the High Level Isolation Unit at the National Center for Infectious Diseases and a member of the Covid-19 Vaccine Expert Committee, said the argument is not between the risks associated with the vaccine and nothing, but rather the vaccine and the Covid-19 disease.
“If we vaccinate people, there are small but known risks, right? But if we don’t vaccinate people, people will get hurt too,” he said.
For example, in the case of polio, there is still a one in a million chance that people may have vaccine-associated polio paralysis. However, in the days leading up to the polio vaccination, there were 350,000 people a year with the disease, said Professor Lim.
“Therefore, we are not necessarily compensating manufacturers for a bad job, we are saying that the vaccine itself has certain intrinsic risks and, by recognizing that intrinsic risk, we allow the benefit of the vaccine to reach the entire population, and not necessarily putting fear and a defensive climate to stop the vaccination process, “he added.
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