Lawsuit: COVID Vaccine Injury Claims Diverted to Unconstitutional ‘Kangaroo Court’
People injured by the COVID-19 vaccines are suing the federal government, claiming the federal program they’re forced to pursue compensation through is an opaque and unconstitutional “kangaroo court” that unjustly rejects almost all claims it receives.
“It has become far more obvious that the program offers nothing close to due process,” says Christopher Dreisbach, the legal affairs director for React19, a patient group of the vaccine injured. “There’s not [just] one thing about the program that can be tweaked and be fixed.”
React19 is one of several plaintiffs challenging the constitutionality of the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). The other plaintiffs are all individuals whose compensation claims were rejected by the CICP, despite many having diagnoses from their doctors that the severe injuries they experienced within a few hours or days of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine were a result of the vaccine.
Their lawsuit was filed in October in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.Â
The CICP is currently the only avenue through which those with a COVID-19 vaccine injury can seek compensation.
A mix of federal law and pandemic-era emergency declarations bar the vaccine injured from suing vaccine manufacturers in civil court. Those with a COVID-19 vaccine injury are also prohibited from pursuing compensation through the standard Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP)—a decades-old program that approves about 50 percent of injury claims in an expedited civil court–like process.
Each year, the VICP paid out $200 million in compensation and attorneys’ fees, all of which are funded by an excise tax on vaccines.
Contrast that with the CICP, which has paid out a total of around $30,000 compensating eight people claiming a COVID-19 vaccine injury.
That’s out of 12,358 total COVID-related claims the CICP has received, according to the latest federal data. The vast majority of those claims are still pending review. Of the 1,600 claims that the CICP has decided, roughly 98 percent were rejected.
The lawsuit filed by React19 and other patients argues the CICP’s high rejection rate is a product of a flawed design that includes an exceedingly short deadline for filing for compensation and an impossibly high burden of proof for showing an injury was caused by a vaccine.
People must file a CICP claim within one year of vaccination. That compares to the VICP deadline that gives people three years following the onset of vaccine injury symptoms to file a petition.
“Most of us don’t know what’s wrong with us for over a year if we can ever get a diag
Article from Reason.com
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