Coronavirus: Hong Kong indemnity fund for vaccine-related deaths, injuries must speed up claims process, critics say
- Authorities take 10 months to grant HK$2 million (US$250,000) in compensation to family of woman who died 16 days after first vaccine dose
- Expert committee says it cannot rule out 66-year-old’s death was connected to her receiving Covid-19 vaccine
Hong Kong should speed up resolving claims for injuries and deaths related to Covid-19 vaccinations, critics have said, after authorities took 10 months to grant HK$2 million (US$254,790) in compensation to the family of a woman who died 16 days after she was inoculated.
A committee of government-appointed experts could not rule out that the death of the 66-year-old woman was connected to her receiving a Covid-19 vaccination, making it the first such instance to be recorded since the indemnity fund scheme was launched in February last year.
The fund was established by authorities to provide financial support to anyone proven to have experienced serious complications as a result of receiving a coronavirus jab.
“Since the virus infection was a known cause of myocarditis, the expert committee considered that a causal relationship between myocarditis and vaccination could not be definitively established because of the conflicting trends of temporal association of myocarditis with vaccination and detection of viral DNA in the heart tissue,” health officials said in an assessment report, which featured comments from the committee.
The woman involved in the claim died 16 days after receiving her first dose of the BioNTech vaccine last July. A postmortem examination found that she had suffered from myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. Parvovirus DNA was also discovered in the deceased’s heart tissue.