“Regarding the Vaccine Damage Payment System – An Open Letter to The Telegraph”

To The Editor, 

While articles by The Telegraph reveal how the VDPS (Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme) has failed many struggling with lost family members and life-changing injuries caused by Covid vaccines, more in-depth reporting is needed to further examine and inform the public of this unfair and not fit for purpose scheme. 

Those responsible, including the vaccine firms, government departments, the MHRA, public health agencies, and the corporate contractors involved, are essentially required to be fully investigated and held to account.  

To highlight one of the issues here, I suggest your team focus on NHSBSA’s business arrangements with Crawford and Co., the company named in an FOI request as the ‘independent medical assessor’ contracted to manage VDPS claims since March 2022. Crawford and Co is a US owned corporation that describes itself  

As the ‘world’s largest publicly listed independent provider of claims management and outsourcing solutions to carriers, brokers and corporates, with an expansive global network’. And is also a ‘leading third-party administrator (TPA) of workers’ compensation claims, liability claims, disability and leave management and medical management services’ via it subsidiary TPA company Broadspire of which may also be associated.      

In typical PR style, NHSBSA states the claims are sent to an ‘independent third-party medical assessor’ and decided by ‘independent medical assessors’ described as ‘General Medical Council (GMC) registered doctors with a license to practice and at least 5 years experience’. This may be reassuring to an unsuspecting public, but if VDPS claimants were accurately informed that their claims are to be decided by doctors working for Crawford and Co, a corporate third-party claims management company, they would likely and quite rightly want to know much more about how reputable and qualified as ‘independent medical assessors’ they are?  

Incidentally, just a brief internet search on customer feedback about Crawford and Co and Broadspire via websites such as Trust Pilot shows predominantly 1-star ratings and a lot of angry comments. The website Glassdoor also reveals some disturbing reports by former staff about the company’s work and management culture within various UK offices. These comments and reports are not directly related to managing VDPS claims, but they indicate the companies may have issues, raising questions if they are suitable for the role.   

Generally, is a commercially driven company with a corporate management strategy an appropriate choice?      

Now to the point – how can Crawford and Co actually be an ‘independent assessor’ if the company is being contracted and paid by NHSBSA? Management will carry out what has been negotiated and is expected of them to deliver on the contract terms, goals and budget etc. Is there public access to the contract negotiated?

And how does the public know that Crawford and Co and/or Broadspire would not engage in questionable business and medical practices similar to when in 2011 it was hired by Johnson & Johnson to act as TPA for patient claims after the company had thousands of US lawsuits related to a hip replacement product recall?

The move brought debate amongst industry and legal experts with critics arguing Broadspire worked to limit payouts and gain control of medical records and materials that could be used against patients in court.       

Unfair claims denial of injury compensation is a complaint claims management firms are often accused of, sometimes by employer/client collusion with insurers/TPA’s, bringing severe consequences for claimants.

There are also a number of nefarious tactics firms use to interfere with and delay the processing of claims. 

Is NHSBSA able to check and have oversight of Crawford’s activities so as to detect and prevent malpractice? 

There is also the fundamental question about whether doctors employed by Crawford and Co. can really be considered as ‘independent medical assessors’ when they are likely to be trained, instructed, incentivized, and so on by management, their peers, and the work culture. Even well-intentioned and well-trained doctors could potentially be drawn into a conflict of interest (COI), and would they generally be inclined to question and challenge improper medical or management practices in this work environment? How does the NHSBSA monitor Crawford and Co’s management? Are staff concerns discussed, acted on, and properly investigated?   

Also, how can claimants know the assessors are qualified in the relevant specialist medical areas to a high enough standard and have the necessary professional experience? Why is there is a lack of transparency on this important issue in which FOI requests are refused by NHSBSA on the grounds of privacy concerns? 

Patients have a right to receive this information which could be made available in a format compatible with privacy laws without disclosing personal details such as by using anonymised data. It is NHSBSA’s duty to patients to be more transparent about the medical assessor and claims processing as practiced by similar schemes in other countries. How does the contracting of a corporate TPA for this role affect transparency?    

And is NHSBSA able to track how medical records and personal data are being used by Crawford and Co?

I urge you to question NHSBSA and Crawford and Co on such matters of transparency and accountability.           

The medical assessors make the crucial final decisions on assessing whether the vaccine-induced causality can be proven and if the level of disability meets the 60% threshold criteria required to receive a one-off payment of £120,000. Patients with very severe physical and neurological disabilities are known to be given assessments below 60% and be judged ‘not disabled enough’ even when causality is proven. For example, 

John Cross became paralyzed and spent seven months in hospital with chronic pain and numbness. He was slowly able to eat, walk, and talk again but relapsed several times. After waiting for over 2 years with only a review of his medical records, and a claims process that simply involved filling in a form with no personal contact or face-to-face assessment, his claim was rejected. Traumatized by the decision and overwhelmed with facing the struggle ahead, John’s mental health rapidly deteriorated, and he tragically took his own life.

This year a survey by UK CV Family, a charity support group for the Covid vaccine injured and bereaved reported that 73% of its members have considered suicide. John’s family are campaigning for VDPS reform and I hope The Telegraph will assist them and others in a similar situation by reporting on their campaigns. 

It was deeply wrong and unjust for John Cross and his family to experience such appalling treatment by a failing system that is negligent and in urgent need of reform. Demonstrating just how shockingly bad the medical assessor can be its job, including the doctors, managers, directors and so on who are responsible.  

There are numerous other examples of malpractice and negligence, including various cases where a rejected claim has eventually been overturned by appeal, further revealing major inconsistencies and raising red flags regarding the quality and reliability of the medical assessments. As in the case of Clare Hibbs who was originally assessed at 25-40% disability and so rejected, but then after a long and strenuous appeal process was later to be re-assessed at 90-100% disability. How can the medical assessors make such a big mistake?

Where does that leave the 98% of claims previously rejected? Have they really been assessed properly?     

And there are reports where medical assessors have gone against the diagnosis of the patient’s own doctors and specialist consultants who oversaw their care to reject the claim. These are medical professionals who may well be more qualified and experienced and who vitally have an interpersonal face-to-face relationship with the patient to examine and communicate with them, unlike the remote desk-bound medical assessors.

Is The Telegraph going to investigate and question NHSBSA and Crawford and Co. about these injustices?  

Families have widely criticized the ‘all or nothing’ 60% disability criteria as being extremely harsh on those who may not have such a very high level of disablement such as paralysis but nonetheless have to cope with a range of life-changing disabilities that are severe to the level whereby they are no longer able to work or live a normal life. Typically, they suffer a combination of physical, neurological, and mental health issues and, of course, financial issues, no longer earning a regular income and having long-term care and treatment costs.     

For even the claimants who do receive the £120,000 payment, a number of them say they have been forced to sue the vaccine firms for proper compensation despite the grueling and expensive legal process because the payment is such a measly amount that it falls well short of meeting the costs of lost income, care, and so on.        

It has to be noted the VDPS is not defined as a compensation scheme by NHSBSA, the vulnerable persons and families affected have to mount a very difficult legal challenge for compensation. It is instead described    

as being a one-off payment scheme to support patients’ ongoing care and needs, but realistically not for long, as the government is no doubt well aware of. The fixed ‘one size fits all’ £120,000 payment is an insult to the bereaved and injured and symbolises how callous NHSBSA, the DHSC and all the organisations involved are by wilfully ignoring the real needs of these very unfortunate people. Keep in mind, this could potentially happen to anyone of us who suddenly find themselves in a desperate situation but then are treated so badly.

It is, therefore, in everyone’s interests to ensure a proper compensation scheme exists that does away with the very strict and unfair 60% criteria and alternatively provides a flexible system where payments are based on a sliding scale commensurate with the level of disability and which covers the full range of claimant’s needs.   

Will The Telegraph join the calls of families, support groups and the public petitioning for VDPS reform? The government should also by now understand that after heavily promoting and coercing mass vaccination on the public and urging millions of people to ‘do their duty’, only to then later break the social contract by shirking from their duty and responsibility of providing adequate compensation and care for when things do inevitably go wrong as they have forecast – how can they really expect the public to again place trust and have confidence in future mass vaccination policies? Public trust is now at an all-time low, and so it is very much in the government’s interests to completely overhaul the VDPS as a move to restore lost confidence.     

One of the major frustrations is how incredibly slow the claims are being processed, taking over 1 year in many cases. As of 25th September 2024, 15,804 claims in total have been received, 7,936 have been notified of an outcome with 188 entitled to a payment. 7,357 claims were rejected due to lack of causation, and 391 were rejected where criteria were met for causation but not for severe disablement. Regarding the time taken,996 claims were received more than 12 months ago but have not yet reached an outcome, and of these, 283 claims were received more than 18 months ago, with less than five stated as having been received over 24 months ago. 

1,226 requests for a mandatory reversal have been received. 638 mandatory reversals have been reassessed. 

The average number of days it took from the receipt of mandatory reversal to receiving an outcome was 238.

38 appeals have been received and are awaiting to be heard by a tribunal. Fewer than five have an outcome.

The FOI statement goes on to describe how part of the claim process is for the assessors to receive a full set of medical records ‘and it can take time…to gather and securely supply copies of these records’. We are also told the review process ‘can vary from case to case depending on the individual circumstances’ and that there are occasions when requests for consent and proof of identity can hold up progress. Personally, I am not convinced by any of these justifications for such slow 6-24 month process times and would suspect the assessors and management are ‘slow walking’ the claims on purpose. Bereaved and injured persons in a vulnerable position simply should not have to wait so long, there are no excuses. If these departments are under-staffed, under-resourced etc., that’s no excuse either, it’s a failure by NHSBSA and Crawford and Co.  

So, what are the figures for the number of medical assessor staff and hours employed, and what is the amount of money spent by the NHSBSA on the third-party contract with Crawford and Co for reviewing the VDPS claim applications? On the first question, an FOI request response by NHSBSA from October 2022 states that although the information requested is not held, they estimate, on average, from a pool of approximately 40 trained assessors, an equivalent of 11 full-time equivalent working hours is spent carrying out medical assessments. And regarding the second question, Esther McVey MP received an answer to this question on

November 24th 2024 from Under-Secretary for the Department of Health and Social Care, Andrew Gwynne,

that the total amount spent from 2022 onwards is just over £25 million. In an article by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson focusing on the relationship between total amounts spent and paid out, they calculate that as 188 claimants received £120,000 totaling £22.6 million, it’s £2.5 million less than the cost of reviewing and

rejecting the claims! This is yet another example of government bureaucracy and outsourcing to corporations costing the taxpayer excessive amounts but delivering far short of acceptable standards. Also, compared to the vast amounts of money into multi-billions of pounds spent, profited and wasted during Covid, why is there so little funding available? How much is Crawford and Co. profiting while the staff levels are so low?       

The authors further highlight interesting findings about the government’s impact assessment of the VDPS indicating ‘the cost management plan was designed to ensure only 25% of vaccine claims related to adverse events would be successful’, or 75% of claims unsuccessful. Did the cost management plans place a limit on the amount of successful claims without care of the severe consequences to the majority of VDPS claimants? 

How have these plans influenced the claims management contract work given to Crawford and Co. and the

‘independent’ medical assessors? These are key questions for The Telegraph to further investigate in-depth.  

To recap, as of 25th September 2024, 15,804 VDPS claims in total have been received. However, considering what is known about reporting issues and data manipulation malpractice related to the adverse event (AE) reporting systems, namely Yellow Card in the UK, VAERS in the US, and Eurosurveillance for the EU, it is reasonable to question the amount of under-reported deaths, injuries and those fraudulently misreported.          

Also, when factoring in data from other sources, including health agency post-marketing safety data systems, health insurance and actuarial industry data, public survey results data, and government data on disability claim rates and cause of death and excess deaths, a different picture emerges that challenges the basis of the official narratives about vaccine injuries being ‘rare‘ and only affecting a ‘minority’ of people. There is much evidence of firms working with agencies in attempts to hide and cover-up data, clearly showing ‘bad faith’.

As in the case of the V-Safe post-marketing safety data system in the US, one of the best data sets available to assess vaccine injury rates that by software app collected questionnaire data from around 10 million users.                

Despite the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) attempting to prevent the public release of the V-Safe data for 464 days the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) legal team led by Aaron Siri was successful in its demand for the release. It showed 7.7% of people reporting the need for medical care, and 70% of those users sought outpatient/urgent clinical care, emergency room care and/or were hospitalised.

In Germany, data ignored by health agencies covering 72 million people provided by health insurers was released, revealing over 2.4 million patients were seen by doctors for adverse events and also a large increase in people dying ‘suddenly and unexpectedly’ by more than fourfold from previous years. This is but one of many examples of insurance industry data releases reporting unprecedented disability and mortality rates corresponding with the vaccine rollout time frames in the US, Germany and other countries. Analysis of the situation in the UK by professional industry analysts Edward Dowd (former Blackrock finance analyst) and Josh Stirling (former Bernstein equity analyst) focusing on disability rates and cause of death point to a similar pattern of massively under-reported deaths and injuries combined with concerning forecasts ahead.   

This suggests that a significant proportion of the UK populations deaths, injuries and disabilities have not been formally attributed to the Covid-19 vaccines and the 15,804 total claims figure is very low in contrast. 

The Telegraph’s article published last year questioning the link between the vaccines and excess deaths was commendable but I hope for more frequent and comprehensive reporting on this critical public health issue. 

Please also investigate, like newspapers in other countries, on whether adverse events and injuries are really so ‘rare’ as we are told? Evidently it is the ‘tip of the iceberg’ and the full scale and depth is being concealed. 

What is a realistic estimate of deaths linked to the vaccines since rollout to the present when considering MHRA’s apparent inability to identify and follow up on reported vaccine deaths, the lack of autopsies, and the misattribution of the deaths to other causes? Also, when the rise in excess deaths from non-Covid causes have reached greater numbers than during the pandemic and are prevalent in younger to middle age groups? 

The ’12 million lives saved’ claim is often referred to by the BBC, The Telegraph etc. and is usually inserted towards the end of articles in support of the official narrative, as if by MHRA decree or OFCOM ‘guidelines’. 

A typical example being ‘despite the ordeals of an unlucky few, the AZ vaccine was an amazing discovery that saved lives and pulled the UK out of a never-ending cycle of lockdowns’. The source is described as an  ‘independent study’ by ‘disease forecasting company’ Airfinity, and readers are naively led to believe if it’s ‘independent’ then it must be true! However, it does not take a seasoned reporter to find out what the truth is, but only a 10 minute web search to learn that Airfinity is not ‘independent’ at all, the company works closely with AZ and other vaccine firms as clients. So, they will likely deliver an analysis agreeable to their clients.

Why do BBC or Telegraph journalists not question these obvious COI’s at all? If you want to know just how ‘independent’ the CEO of Airfinity is then read his article calling for NATO to manage pandemic responses. What a great idea to install the military into public health! What could possibly go wrong? Although who is actually ‘pulling his strings’ to promote such ideas in the press? It’s no big surprise the ‘independent study’ by Airfinity is based on more modelling from Imperial College, but alas ‘Professor Pantsdown’ is in exile this time. Yet still Airfinity has plenty of faulty assumptions for over-inflated figures to be pulled out of thin air. 

I refer you to an article by Dr. Heneghan and Dr. Jefferson that picks apart all the major errors in the study, and I urge The Telegraph to re-evaluate the credibility of the Airfinity study and fully investigate any COI’s.   

MSM may now deflect away from ‘The Twilight Zone’ living nightmare to the ‘success story’ of vaccines, but the reality was citizens were targeted with relentless propaganda as the state spent nearly £900 million on PR campaigns using unethical fear and trauma tactics, while subsidised newspapers militaristically called on the public to ‘do their duty’, join ‘jabs army’ and fight in the ‘War on Covid’ to end lockdown via the ‘jabs for freedom’ strategy. Only to discard the inevitable casualties who were cruelly marginalized and censored. 

Government plans for scientifically flawed, immoral vaccine passports, a two-tier society and mandates reminiscent of authoritarian regimes were scrapped, unmasking a very ugly manifestation of totalitarianism.  

Critics were illegally put under surveillance and harassed by military psychological warfare units deploying armies of trolls, bots, and dis-info agents that used their dirty tricks to disrupt debate via social media, etc.     

Big Tech giants enforced censorship, de-platforming and debunking akin to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’ in which even accounts of the vaccine bereaved and injured were shut down and labelled as ‘anti-vaxxers’.

Media ‘personality disorders’ acted as bullying ringleaders calling for persecution of the unvaccinated until ‘the science changed’ of course, after which these moronic sociopaths were finally forced to face the realities known for a long time that the vaccines and multiple boosters did not prevent transmission or reinfections. 

Every person should support actions to ensure people are given proper compensation and care when there is a vaccine-related death or injury, as it can potentially happen to anyone who suddenly finds themselves, family members, or friends in a very unfortunate situation. Also, whatever an individual’s or organization’s views are on vaccine issues, traditional shared values of common decency, fairness, human rights, and dignity have a higher place if we are to live in a civilized society. The government and the vaccine industry cannot be allowed to avoid their responsibilities by abandoning vulnerable people and treating them so inhumanely as if they were expendable collateral damage. The VDPS offers too little, too late, too few, and is urgently in need of an overhaul. This huge scandal deserves as much attention as any reported in recent times by the UK media.  

Sincerely, 

Jonathan Hall | Website | Research Archive

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Public Interest is the personal blog of Jonathan Hall, who could be described as a ‘concerned member of the public’, or perhaps an ‘occasional citizen journalist’, focused on revealing the truth about Covid-era injustices and preventing them from happening again.

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