This post will tell you:
- How to get basic legal information for your country.
- What diagnoses you want to get for the purposes of injury compensation.
Basic legal information
One way to get legal information for free is to do a Google search for “vaccine injury” + your country’s name + the word attorney/lawyer
e.g. “vaccine injury” lawyer United States
Lawyers will do something called content marketing where they put up useful information on the Internet as a way of attracting customers. They put legal information on their website so that hopefully you stumble across it with Google (or other search engine like Yandex).
To figure out how profitable your situation is, you can figure out how they get paid.
- If they take contingency (they only get paid if your court case is won), your type of legal case is profitable. There’s money to be made.
- If they don’t take contingency, then they may (or may not) be trying to milk you for legal fees. You have to be careful because the legal information that they give on their website may be self-serving and/or misleading. They may want to collect fees from you even if your case isn’t great.
Remember that every country is different. What applies to the US doesn’t apply elsewhere.
Information specific to the United States
Skip ahead to the next section if you aren’t American.
There are two programs- CICP and VICP.
CICP
This program sucks. So far the amount of money paid out for COVID vaccine injuries has been insulting… it’s barely worth your time filing for this.
There are deadlines to file. From the HRSA website:
Does the CICP have a filing deadline?
Yes, you have ONE (1) YEAR from the date that the covered countermeasure was received to file for CICP benefits by submitting a Request for Benefits Form (PDF - 245 KB).
It’s not clear to me whether going for CICP makes you ineligible for VICP. Aaron Siri’s website has this to say:
it is possible that the VICP may not accept claims that have already been filed in the CICP or which could have been filed but were not filed in the CICP. Please keep in mind that if the COVID-19 vaccine is added to the VICP, strict filing deadlines will apply so it is important to reach out right away for an assessment of your claim. Information on the VICP can be found on its website including a comparison chart of the VICP and CICP.
VICP
If the COVID vaccines get added to the VICP program, the lawyers will probably make a lot of money (because that was the case for other vaccines) so they will chase your business.
IF they are added to VICP, make sure that you file in time. If you fill out any of the intake forms on VICP lawyer websites, they will send you an email to remind you.
Aaron Siri’s website has a good rundown of the VICP/CICP situation.
Diagnoses
You or your attorney will have to argue that your health problems were strongly related to the vaccine. For the US VICP program, this isn’t too hard to figure out. The lawyers pay attention to what worked in the past. When they do content marketing, they list medical conditions that did well in VICP compensation cases. So you generally want a diagnosis of the following…
Big list of health conditions
- Heart: Myocarditis, pericarditis
- Allergy: Allergic reaction to the vaccine or a vaccine component such as PEG (polyethylene glycol).
- Shoulder injury: SIRVA, frozen shoulder, adhesive capsulitis
- Bleeding disorders: Low blood platelets (thrombocytopenia), VITT (Vaccine-Induced Immune Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia, ITP (Immune thrombocytopenic purpura).
- Blood clotting disorders: e.g. embolism (blood clot), stroke
- Facial paralysis: Bell’s Palsy.
- Nerve damage: Guillain barre syndrome (the immune system damages the nerves, causing muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis).
Certain rare conditions:
- (Death)
- CIDP (this is sort of like the permanent form of Guillain Barre Syndrome)
- Parsonage Turner syndrome (brachial neuritis)
- ADEM (Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis)
- Aplastic anemia (not enough new blood cells)
- Cellulitis (bacterial skin infection)
- Complex Regional Pain Syndrome - a form of chronic pain that usually affects an arm or a leg
- Encephalitis - brain swelling, which can be caused by an autoimmune response
- Polymyalgia Rheumatica - inflammatory disorder that causes muscle pain and stiffness, especially in the shoulders and hips
- Polyneuropathy - simultaneous malfunction of many peripheral nerves throughout the body
- Pemphigus - blisters on skin (Google image search this to see what it looks like)
- Transverse myelitis - inflammation of both sides of one section of the spinal cord
- Vasculitis - a group of disorders that destroy blood vessels by inflammation
- *MIS-V - overlaps heavily with Kawasaki disease but isn’t quite the same thing. (*But see below.)
Other medical conditions
Another way to argue your case is to point towards side effects that your country’s health authorities recognize. MIS-V is one of those conditions.
In the US, small fiber neuropathy isn’t currently recognized by the letter agencies but there are probably other countries that do recognize SFN as a side effect of the vaccine. Germany sort of recognizes “Post Vac Syndrome”, which is Long COVID symptoms from the vaccine. So, it can depend on what country you’re in.
These situations are kinda dicey because there will be a medical pissing match between you and the other side trying to avoid giving out money. If the lawyers don’t want to touch this stuff… it’s because it’s not very profitable.
HOWEVER, we as patients might want to push for adding in ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, etc. to cases that are good without those diagnoses. A lot of vaccine injuries aren’t getting the recognition that they deserve and we need to push for that.
How you get a diagnosis
You have to look at your symptoms and figure out if you might have a condition in the big list above.
Then you have to figure out how you would get a diagnosis.
- To get a referral to a specialist, you have to politely talk to your doctor and not come off as a hypochondriac who had too many consultations with Dr. Google. Some doctors hate patients who see Dr. Google on the side and they may ignore your symptoms because of it. So maybe you point out that you may have X and you’d like your doctor to help you figure out if you have X or not (instead of pushing your doctor to diagnose you with X, which they may not like). If you can’t talk your way into getting more medical help, then you can always fire your doctor.
- Some medical diagnoses are somewhat subjective. Doctor shopping can increase your chances of getting a diagnosis. For example, the doctors which really like IVIG will lean towards diagnosing their patients with GBS, CIDP, and SFN.
Is this a good idea for your health? Maybe not. You can get misdiagnosed if you see too many doctors or doctor shopped your way into somebody who misdiagnoses you. On top of that, a few tests like cardiac MRI have real risk that can leave you with very debilitating long-term side effects (gadolinium toxicity is no joke). See the post on risky medical tests.
Another legal option - did your employer or university make you take the vaccine?
If your employer made you get jabbed, then you may have legal options under worker compensation laws. However, there are deadlines so make sure that you start the process in time.
A similar situation might exist for universities that forced its students to get jabbed. As a first step to figuring that out, do a Google search to see if other university students in your situation have filed a claim against a university in your country/state/province. You may be able to do a similar case.
Class action lawsuits
If a class action would be profitable, a law firm will start a class action on their own initiative. Robert F Kennedy’s law firm started a class action over Gardasil (HPV vaccine) in the United States. While the damages in a COVID vaccine class action would be much higher than the damages in a Gardasil lawsuit (more people took the Pfizer COVID vaccine), the laws in the US don’t allow for it so that’s why RFK’s law firm isn’t doing it.
Another option is to crowdfund for a class action. A group in Australia is trying to do this. That is one way to make an unprofitable lawsuit happen.
Free speech rights, constitutional rights, Charter rights, etc.
There are various lawsuits over your rights as a citizen. In the US, there is the NCLA case and Missouri v Biden. You won’t get money out of these cases but you will participate in something for the greater good.
In Canada, there have been a long list of lawsuits over:
- Trucker convoy
- Churches that broke lockdown orders
- The CCF’s cases like Kassian v British Columbia, being an intervenor in the Jordan Peterson case, etc.
- The JCCF’s cases
- Licensing colleges persecuting doctors
Closing thoughts
Unfortunately, a lot of the injured will not get the compensation they deserve. Many debilitating conditions simply aren’t being recognized by the medical establishment so we won’t get proper compensation. Sorry.
Some countries are better than others.
The whole situation is highly political and right now the winds aren’t blowing in our favour. But… there’s something better than compensation and that’s getting your health back. About 7% of chronic illness sufferers are mostly recovered and I outlined ways in which we might get that number higher. I feel like we’re more likely to recover than we are to get full and proper compensation for what happened.