Imagine being a healthy 18-year-old high school senior with deep-seated goals and aspirations and having those goals seriously altered after a COVID gene-therapy injection.  

Imagine experiencing intermittent nausea, increased heart rate, headaches and stroke-like symptoms following vaccination and then learning that you have developed Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis due to blood clotting in the brain. How about having your first seizure 11 days after vaccination, followed by three brain surgeries due to blood clots in the brain, and then struggling to walk with a cane due to limited motor function, and requiring the use of voice recognition software to write or type?

Such is the case of Emma Burkey, who along with seven other injured individuals and React19 – a non-profit organization providing financial, physical, and emotional support to those suffering long-term adverse events from COVID-19 vaccines - is part of an important lawsuit seeking due compensation from a Health and Human Resource program that failed to deliver.

The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) was established under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act of 2005 (“PREP Act”) to provide “timely, uniform, and adequate compensation to eligible individuals for covered injuries directly caused by the administration or use of a covered countermeasure.” CICP was created so that if you were injured by a COVID-19 vaccine, you can file a claim. But, as ICAN attorney Aaron Siri explains: “It’s  equivalent to shoving papers into a black hole and waiting to see what comes back.”  As it turns out, the government provides no timeline for deciding requests and plaintiffs have no way of tracking requests until they receive a case number sometime in the future.  Indeed, Emma Burkey received her J&J injection on March 20, 2021 and is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit two years after the fact. 

But timing is not the only problem surrounding compensation.

To begin, the PREP Act provides near complete immunity to pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Moderna, J&J and Novavax for injuries and deaths that were caused by their COVID-19 products.  And as for payouts, some interesting statistics are revealed in the complaint.  As of Sept. 1, 2023, 12,110 CICP claims have been filed. Yet…

“The Program has compensated only four of those claims, three for myocarditis and one for anaphylaxis. The average payout on COVID-19 claims to date is $2,148.14.

By comparison, CICP’s average payout on injuries related to the H1N1 vaccine was $198,450.12. Over 90% (10,949/12,110) of the COVID-19 countermeasure claims remain “pending review or in review.” In rare instances where a decision has been reached, over 97% of those COVID-19 countermeasure claims have been denied (1,129/1,161). CICP has awarded compensation to a lamentable 0.033% of total COVID-19 claimants (4/12,110), and benefits determinations remain pending for 0.2% of total COVID-19 claimants (27/12,110).”

CICP’s claims, submission and review process is shrouded in secrecy as they are reviewed according to “unidentified standards and no clear process or timeline for the review is disclosed.”  There is also no opportunity for discovery or a method to request or review documents that reveal how the government arrived at its determination.

The government also does not identify any expert witnesses or consultants used in making determinations. And plaintiffs cannot even have the opportunity to question or cross-examine experts the government uses.  Plaintiffs cannot even present their own expert witnesses.

CICP is also terribly underfunded. The complaint indicates that $5 million and $7 million were budgeted for “administration” in 2022 and 2023 while hundreds of millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered. Rather than supplying compensation costs, it was the priority of administration (i.e., employees) that made up 94% of total costs. Remember, as indicated above, only four out of 12,110 were compensated at the time of the filing (currently the number is 6 out of 12,233).

What’s more, it appears that the CICP is unable to adequately compensate the injured. If claims were compensated at CICP’s historical rate, CICP would be paying $21.16 million in compensation and $317.94 million in total outlays which amounts to be 72.1 times its current balance.  This, according to the complaint, is “further evidence that the program is simply theater.”

Although I am just scratching the surface of the problems laid out in the lawsuit, it is evident that the CICP program has not and perhaps cannot fulfill its duties to those injured from COVID-19 effects. Apart from budgetary issues, there are fundamental requirements for due process in the American judicial system and this lawsuit argues that the CICP program does not meet that constitutional due process.  As Siri states:

“When you file your claim what do you put into your petition? Not clear.  Who’s going to review it? You don’t know…  Can you petition them for more information to ask questions about how they are going to review? No.  Do you know what experts they are going to use?  No.  Can you ask their experts questions? No, because you don’t know who they are...You have no discovery rights, no rights to address the tribunal… They’re not only sitting there basically as the judge, they’re also the prosecutioners.  There’s basically no distinction there.”

The lawyers are asking that the CICP be corrected in all of these ways, otherwise the entire statute needs to be struck down to the extent that it fails to provide basic due process protections, transparency, and judicial oversight.

Such compensation improvements consistent with constitutional due process are now sorely needed as powerful interests have recently announced their commitment to funding the development of next generation vaccines.  

On Oct. 13, the U.S Department of Health and Human Services announced $500 million in awards for Project NexGen.  And a few days before that, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced new investments to advance access to mRNA research and vaccine manufacturing technology in Africa.  It seems the injurious, if not lethal, jab experiments are alive and well.  All the more reason for the CICP, which is inextricably bound with the immunity provided to the manufacturers, to be fixed if not struck down.  With so many delicate, shattered human lives in the balance, there is no place for such an unlawful and dishonest vaccine compensation program. As indicated in the lawsuit:

“CICP is the epitome of a kangaroo court or a star chamber — a proceeding that ignores recognized standards of law and justice, is grossly unfair, and comes to a predetermined conclusion.”

Victor Fernandez is a former Logic/Philosophy of Science adjunct and retired math teacher.

Image: U.S. government photo, via RawPixel // public domain