I very much doubt that the pleadings in the AZ litigation bang on about Nuremberg and other such rubbish.

For my part, I think the government should reform the vaccine injury compensation scheme to make such litigation as that against AZ unnecessary. The test that applies – 60% disability – is too high and the maximum pay out - £120k – is too low to properly address the issue.

As the article points out, it will be the government who will pay any compensation that the claimants are awarded as AZ has an indemnity agreement with the government that it obtained as a condition of making the vaccine available in the UK.

And before anyone gets upset about the indemnity arrangement that AZ has, they need to think about vaccine roll outs. Firstly, they are regarded as being in the interest of the general public and secondly, there is an inherent risk involved in them. That risk arises because clinical trials such as those that the AZ vaccine went through are by necessity limited in size (with tens of thousands of participants as opposed to the millions that the vaccine will be administered to), which means that a very rare complication such as the thrombocytopenia that is linked to the AZ vaccine may not be picked up until post release surveillance does so (as it was in April 2021 for the AZ jab).

There is also a fairly strong moral argument for AZ being indemnified given that their vaccine was made available on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic. AZ are not even a company that is heavily involved in vaccine production. They were simply a partner of convenience for Oxford University after the other big UK pharmaceutical player -GSK – got into bed with the French company Sanofi to try to produce a vaccine.

It is tragic that anyone was injured by any of the covid vaccines, but to put matters into perspective, the AZ vaccine is estimated to have saved 6.5 million lives worldwide, in part because it was made available in countries who would not have been able to afford the mRNA vaccines and which did not have the infrastructure to store and distribute them. That will obviously be of no comfort whatsoever to the injured and their families, but that’s the long and short of it.

Of course, the bigger question is if the vaccines were not the answer to the pandemic then what was? I appreciate that some people deny the existence of the SARS-Cov2 virus or get wrapped up in theories about its origin, but I think most people know that it swept around the world killing very large numbers of people and causing long term injury to many more.