The Flawed Assessment of VDPS Claims

A System Designed to Fail?

The Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS) is often portrayed as a financial lifeline for those suffering from vaccine-related injuries. However, upon closer examination, the system appears fundamentally flawed, leaving many without the support they desperately need. Instead of functioning as a proper compensation scheme, the VDPS serves as a temporary measure, intended only to provide interim financial assistance until claimants can pursue legal redress. Given the significant legal barriers and reluctance of courts to hear such cases in the UK, this supposed route to justice remains largely inaccessible.

It is important to note that although the VDPS is frequently referred to as a 'compensation' scheme, it is in fact an award scheme. This distinction is crucial, as the payment is not intended to fully compensate claimants for their losses but rather to provide a fixed sum for those who meet the strict eligibility criteria. The award is a one-off payment of £120,000, which is unlikely to cover lost earnings or care costs. If a claimant later wins compensation through legal means, they are required to repay this amount.

The Two Crucial Criteria

To qualify for a VDPS award, claimants must meet two stringent criteria:

1. A 60% Disability Threshold – This requirement is highly subjective, based on arbitrary determinations rather than comprehensive medical assessments. The standard is often interpreted narrowly, favoring cases with obvious physical disabilities such as limb loss or blindness resulting from industrial injury models rather than vaccine-related conditions, which can present in more complex ways.

2. Causation – In theory, causation should be determined on the balance of probabilities, meaning that if it is more likely than not that a vaccine caused the injury, a claim should be upheld. However, in practice, the process has been manipulated to rely exclusively on what is recorded in medical notes. This is particularly problematic as numerous cases exist where doctors have verbally acknowledged vaccine injury but refused to document it in writing. The refusal to consider these oral confirmations severely disadvantages claimants and skews the assessment process.

Training for Medical Assessors

HART member and general practitioner, Dr Ayeisha Malik, applied to be a medical assessor. She told us,

“I applied to be a medical assessor in July 2022, in the hope of helping the vaccine-injured. I hoped to learn more about covid vaccine injury during the training: the mechanisms of vaccine-injuries and the pathophysiology of covid vaccines. However, I was surprised the training for the post was a tick box exercise and felt more like an admin job. The training was delivered by a physiotherapist from this company and lasted approximately one hour online.

The assessment did not involve any patient contact, but reading through the patient notes and looking for two things:

1) the impact from the vaccine on the patient's life.

2) evidence of documented vaccine injury.

The assessor's job was not to independently assess whether the injury sustained was related to a vaccine, but to see if the vaccine-injury had already been documented in the notes by the medical team who had assessed the patient previously.

Patients are probably submitting their notes, hoping the medical assessor could diagnose their injury as probably from the vaccine, but this is not the case.

The medical assessor is also meant to look for other possible explanations of the vaccine-injury. We were given the example of someone who suffered a myocardial infarction following vaccination and told to look for any other possible cause e.g. they were also hypertensive, so it was probably due to that rather than the vaccine.

It was clear the assessments were not meant to be successful claims.

Following the training, I was offered the post, but declined, so never took up the post. I ended up sending the company case reports of injury in an attempt to educate them.

I hope the vaccine injured get a fairer assessment and financial help. This current award and assessment is clearly not fit for purpose.”

Without proper training, assessments are inconsistent at best and outright dismissive at worst.

Crawford & Co's Reputation

VDPS claims are assessed not by an independent medical body, but by a third-party company, Crawford & Co, which has been contracted by NHSBSA to handle medical assessments. This US-owned claims management firm has a troubling reputation, with numerous reports of mismanagement and claims denials across various sectors, including disability and insurance claims.

Several concerning aspects of their involvement include:

• Conflicts of interest – As a corporate entity operating within a contractual framework, there are concerns about whether financial considerations could influence claim outcomes.

• Poor customer feedback – Crawford & Co has faced longstanding criticism, with complaints dating back 10-15 years regarding systemic issues in its claims management processes. Public reviews on platforms like Trustpilot and Glassdoor consistently highlight delays, poor communication, and unfair claim denials across sectors such as home insurance, personal injury, and workplace compensation. Many claimants and former employees report inconsistent assessments, lack of transparency, and the dismissal of key medical evidence. Some allege that medical assessors fail to provide adequate reasoning, dismiss critical medical documentation, or conduct assessments without meaningful engagement. These persistent concerns raise serious doubts about the company's ability to conduct fair and impartial evaluations and the decision made to hire them for this work.

• Opaque decision-making – The company's processes lack transparency, and Freedom of Information requests regarding their contract terms with NHSBSA have been denied.

Given this history, the fairness of VDPS claim assessments and whether financial considerations are taking precedence over medical integrity must be investigated.

Rejections

The high rejection rate of VDPS claims was not an accident but part of the financial plan for the scheme. In April 2021, after significant harm had already occurred, the government set out to reject between 97.4% and 99.7% of applicants (UK Government Impact Assessment). This premeditated approach raises serious concerns about whether claims were ever intended to be fairly assessed.

Notably, the UK’s rejection rate closely mirrors that of the USA, where claimant success rates are similarly low (US Congressional Report). Given these outcomes, serious questions must be raised about how medical assessors are instructed and what is influencing their decision-making. Is there a deliberate effort to limit the number of successful claims to manage costs? If so, this represents a gross injustice to those who trusted the system to provide fair treatment.

The appeal process has also been exposed as entirely ineffective, with a staggering 0% success rate according to NHSBSA data FOI-02310. This indicates that claimants who challenge the initial decision have virtually no chance of overturning a rejection, further reinforcing concerns about the integrity of the assessment process.

The extremely high rejection rate of VDPS claims suggests that the medical assessors may be receiving guidance that prioritizes minimizing payouts rather than assessing cases fairly. Some shocking examples include:

• Cases where inquests have ruled vaccines as the cause of death, yet families have still been denied payments.

• Severely disabled individuals being assessed below the 60% threshold despite overwhelming medical evidence.

Given these outcomes, serious questions must be raised about how medical assessors are instructed and what is influencing their decision-making. Is there a deliberate effort to limit the number of successful claims to manage costs? If so, this represents a gross injustice to those who trusted the system to provide fair treatment.

Government Spending on Administration vs. Payouts

An alarming revelation has emerged: the UK government has spent more on administration and medical assessors for the VDPS than on actual payouts to claimants (Trust The Evidence). This raises serious concerns about the scheme’s priorities and whether financial resources are being allocated to serve claimants or simply to sustain bureaucratic inefficiencies.

A Broken System in Need of Reform

The VDPS, as it stands, is failing those it was designed to support. Its restrictive eligibility criteria, reliance on inadequate medical records, and poorly trained assessors combine to create a system that appears more focused on denying claims than providing fair compensation. The involvement of Crawford & Co, a company with a history of questionable claims practices, further undermines confidence in the scheme. If public trust in vaccine programs is to be maintained, a full overhaul of the VDPS is required. This must include:

• A more flexible, case-by-case assessment of disability.

• A fairer standard for causation that considers all available evidence.

• Proper training for medical assessors, including guidance on vaccine injury presentations.

• Transparency regarding the role of third-party contractors and how they are incentivized.

Without these changes, the VDPS will remain an unfit mechanism, offering little more than false hope to those in desperate need of support.

Peer support and help for vaccine injured available at UKCVFamily.org, registered Charity