Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many applications for compensation under the Vaccine Damage Payments Act 1979 were rejected in (a) 2019 and (b) 2020 as a result of the threshold requirement of 60 percent disability not being reached; and in how many of those cases the level of disability was less than 10 percent.

The Vaccine Damage Payments Scheme (VDPS) provides a one-off tax free payment, currently £120,000, to those people who are severely disabled as a result of vaccination against a specified disease, within the meaning of the Act.

It is not compensation. It is a payment to help ease the financial burden for those individuals where, on very rare occasions, vaccination has caused severe disablement.

To qualify for a Vaccine Damage Payment, two legal tests have to be met:

1. establishing, on the balance of probabilities, that the disablement was caused by vaccination covered by the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS);
2. the resulting disablement is severe disablement (60% or more)

The majority of claims to the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme are turned down on the basis of medical assessments that have concluded, vaccination did not cause the disability.

In 2019 1 claim was rejected as a result of the threshold requirement of 60 percent disability not being reached. The figure for 2020 is Zero.

The actual percentage of disablement is not recorded by the Vaccine Damage Payments Unit.