Harney ‘delaying vaccine damage support’

TÁNAISTE and Minister for Health Mary Harney has been accused of foot dragging in providing support for children damaged by State vaccination programmes.

Last summer Ms Harney said the department planned to be in a position to recommend the most suitable model for an Irish compensation scheme towards the end of the year. No such decision has been made yet.

Fine Gael’s Denis Naughton said the Department of Health’s study of vaccination compensation schemes in other countries was completed in 2004 and the matter had been allowed to drag on since then.

Last October Minister Harney told Mr Naughton that her officials were continuing to examine the feasibility of introducing a Vaccine Damage Compensation Scheme.

Ms Harney said she would be in a position to consider the available options when the most relevant models from a clinical, administrative and fairness point of view had been identified.

Mr Naughton said the matter had been allowed to drag on for too long. “If the State damaged these children then they should be compensated,” he insisted.

Mr Naughton said many of those damaged were now in their 30s and their parents were elderly and under tremendous strain providing round the clock care for their children.

“In a lot of these cases the parents don’t necessarily want compensation. What they do want is a guarantee that the services their children need will be provided,” he said. And, he said, the numbers involved would be very small.

Mr Naughton said he had been involved with around 100 people believed to have been damaged by the three-in-one vaccination (diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus) as far back as the 1970s. He reckoned that the number of people damaged by other vaccinations was probably smaller.

“Even if the figure is double that, we are still talking about very small numbers,” he said.

In 1982 the Government offered a once-off ex-gratia payment of €12,700 (£10,000) to 16 parents of vaccine damaged children but Mr Naughton said this was a totally inadequate to cater for their long-term needs.

There has been only one court compensation pay out linked to the vaccine.

The €2.75 million pay out was awarded to Kenneth Best, a Cork man who received the three-in-one vaccine in 1969.

Mr Naughton said a number of parents tried to go down the same route as the family of Kenneth Best but found they had insufficient medical records and had appealed to the State to investigate the matter on their behalf.

Although there has been much focus on the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine in recent years all the most reputable scientific evidence is that the vaccine is safe and not linked to either autism or bowel disease.