UK under emergency condition approved Pfizer vaccine for its People usage now has announced that the government will pay individuals who suffer any severe side-effects from COVID-19 vaccines under an existing programme, on Thursday. The Department of Health and Social Care said COVID-19 will be added as a "precautionary step" to the list of diseases covered for potential liabilities under the Vaccine Damage Payments Scheme (VDPS). It added that vaccines would be deployed only after stringent checks. 

VDPS was set up in 1979 and covers victims of side-effects caused by common vaccines, such as those against measles, influenza, smallpox and tetanus. The government has included the vaccine against the H1N1 swine flu in 2009 to the list. Apart from the vaccine availability, the recent debate is on the compensation caused by the side effects. Under the VDPS scheme, individuals are eligible to a sum capped at 120,000 pounds ($161,676) if they can prove to have been seriously disabled as a result of a vaccination.

"The current scheme is not really adequate for the current situation. If adverse events occur, the route to compensation is too complicated. It would be much better if the government set up a bespoke scheme for COVID-19," said Duncan Fairgrieve, of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. Britain said it would continue to monitor the safety of Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine after the country on Wednesday became the first in the Western world to approve a COVID-19 vaccine. 

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