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HEALTH AND SCIENCE
You can’t sue Pfizer or Moderna if you have severe Covid vaccine side effects. The government likely won’t compensate you for damages either
If you experience severe side effects after getting a
Covid vaccine, lawyers tell CNBC there is basically no one to blame in a U.S. court of law.
The federal government has granted companies like
Pfizer and
Moderna immunity from liability if something unintentionally goes wrong with their vaccines.
“It is very rare for a blanket immunity law to be passed,” said Rogge Dunn, a Dallas labor and employment attorney. “Pharmaceutical companies typically aren’t offered much liability protection under the law.“
You also can’t sue the Food and Drug Administration for authorizing a vaccine for emergency use, nor can you hold your employer accountable if they mandate inoculation as a condition of employment.
Congress
created a fund specifically to help cover lost wages and out-of-pocket medical expenses for people who have been irreparably harmed by a “covered countermeasure,” such as a vaccine. But it is difficult to use and rarely pays. Attorneys say it has compensated less than 6% of the claims filed in the last decade.
Immune to lawsuits
In February, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar
invoked the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. The 2005 law empowers the HHS secretary to provide legal protection to companies making or distributing critical medical supplies, such as vaccines and treatments, unless there’s “willful misconduct” by the company
. The protection lasts until 2024.
That means that for the next four years, these companies
“cannot be sued for money damages in court” over injuries related to the administration or use of products to treat or protect against
Covid.
HHS declined CNBC’s request for an interview.
Dunn thinks a big reason for the unprecedented protection has to do with the expedited timeline.
“When the government said, ‘We want you to develop this four or five times faster than you normally do,’ most likely the manufacturers said to the government, ‘We want you, the government, to protect us from multimillion-dollar lawsuits,’” said Dunn.
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Companies like Pfizer and Moderna have total immunity from legal liability under the PREP Act if something unintentionally goes wrong with their Covid vaccines.
www.cnbc.com
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