German COVID-19 Vaccine Manufacturer Faces Lawsuit for Alleged Harm

A health worker fills a syringe with a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in a file image. Emmi Korhonen/Lehtikuva/AFP via Getty Images

A German resident has filed a lawsuit against BioNTech due to alleged negative side effects of its COVID-19 vaccine.

The plaintiff, a woman, is suing BioNtech for compensation of at least 150,000 euros ($161,226) for bodily harm allegedly resulting from its COVID-19 vaccine. According to the plaintiff, who has not made her name public, she suffered from swollen extremities, fatigue, sleeping disorder, and pain in the upper body following vaccination. The first case hearing was scheduled at a regional court in Hamburg on Monday.

Speaking to Reuters, Tobias Ulbrich, a lawyer at Rogert & Ulbrich representing the plaintiff, said he wants to challenge an assessment made by German vaccine assessment bodies and European Union regulators that BioNTech has shown a positive risk-benefit profile.

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BioNTech dismissed the case, insisting that it was without merit. “The positive benefit-risk profile of Comirnaty remains positive, and the safety profile has been well characterized,” the company said, according to the media outlet. Comirnaty is the brand name of the firm’s COVID-19 vaccine that it developed with Pfizer.

However, Rogert & Ulbrich insists that the vaccine has led to suffering among the vaccinated. “Many COVID vaccination victims suffer from various symptoms such as pain, anxiety, muscle weakness, fatigue, and many others. For some people, these symptoms are so severe that they are no longer able to work and become disabled,” the law firm said on its website.

German Victims

In a recent media briefing, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) insisted that COVID-19 vaccines were beneficial and that the shots were estimated to have saved nearly 20 million people worldwide.

However, it did admit that Comirnaty posed a small risk of heart inflammation conditions like pericarditis and myocarditis, especially among young men. According to the agency, 1.7 million reports of suspected side-effects resulting from COVID-19 vaccines were reported by May, according to Reuters.

According to a May 28 report by the German news outlet Deutschlandfunk Kultur, many athletes have suffered negative consequences after taking a vaccine shot.

Nike Schmitz, a 25-year-old former soccer player, had taken the COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 to protect the lives of people with learning disabilities for whom she was giving a sports course at the time. According to the report, just a few hours after the first vaccination, she began to experience adverse side effects, which worsened as the weeks progressed.

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Schmitz said she was “very ill with a very high fever, around 40 degrees. They just stopped, too, for weeks. I also had swollen parts of my body. So especially the face was extremely swollen.”

“I got a severe inflammation of the cornea—and my eyesight got worse and worse. Then there were cardiovascular problems. I often felt short of breath. Then my legs hurt so much that they hurt with every step.”

US Incidents

American citizens have also filed lawsuits alleging injury from COVID-19 vaccination. Recently, the family of a college student who is said to have died from heart inflammation after taking Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot sued the Biden administration, alleging that officials engaged in “willful misconduct.”

In the lawsuit seeking damages, relatives of the college student, George Watts Jr., accused the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) of wrongly promoting COVID-19 vaccination by constantly claiming that the shots were “safe and effective.”

That DOD promotion “duped millions of Americans, including Mr. Watts, into being DOD’s human subjects in its medical experiment, the largest in modern history,” the lawsuit said.

According to a report by Phinance Technologies, a global macro investment firm, COVID-19 damages in the United States have resulted in more than 26 million people being injured in 2022, with the injuries costing almost $150 billion to the economy.

In addition, the report estimated the vaccine damage to be responsible for 1.36 million disabilities and approximately 310,000 excess deaths.