More Than $11 Million Paid out by Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program

A sign is displayed in front of Health Canada headquarters in Ottawa in a file photo. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) has surpassed $11.2 million in payouts, according to updated bi-annual records.

VISP was launched in June 2021 following the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines. Since then, 2,233 applications have been received by the program. Of those, 1,825 were deemed admissible, 1,032 are in the process of collecting medical records, and 138 claims have been approved by the Medical Review Board. Another 164 applications are pending review for eligibility.

During the last VISP update in July 2023, a total of 1,859 claims had been received, with 103 approved totalling $6,695,716 in payments. A total of 66 were pending administrative review for eligibility. The next update from the VISP is expected to be released in June 2024.

VISP’s stated purpose is to ensure that all Canadians who have experienced “a serious and permanent injury” as a result of receiving a Health Canada-authorized vaccine administered in Canada on or after Dec. 8, 2020, have “fair and timely access to financial support.” VISP applies to all individuals vaccinated in Canada, except for those vaccinated in Quebec who receive coverage from the province’s long-standing program.

Management of the VISP program was contracted out to Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton Consulting, a firm that also manages a $21.6 million Memorial Grant Program that pays families of police, firefighters, and paramedics who die as a result of service.

VISP defines a “serious and permanent injury” as a “severe, life-threatening or life-altering injury that may require in-person hospitalization or a prolongation of existing hospitalization, and results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or where the outcome is a congenital malformation or death.”

According to statistics from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which was last updated on Sept. 15, 2023, there have been 57,436 total adverse events of special interest (AESI) following COVID vaccination, with 11,231 being labelled as “serious” and 46,205 being labelled as “non-serious.”

The Canadian government said the only two safety signals related to the COVID-19 vaccines that have been confirmed are Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) and myocarditis/pericarditis, which were reported in Canada during the outset of the COVID vaccination campaign and detected internationally.

There have been a total of 86 reports of TTS and 1,207 reports of myocarditis/pericarditis that met the criteria to be reported as AESI. “These reports do not imply a causal relationship between the vaccines and the adverse event,” PHAC notes on its website for vaccine statistics.

Back in 2021, PHAC wrote in a memo that a total of $75 million in funding had been earmarked for the first five years of the program and that the overall cost of the program was dependent on the “volume of claims and compensation awarded over time.”

Underreporting of Vaccine Injuries

PHAC has funded work by the Canadian Immunization Research Network on its Canadian National Vaccine Safety (CANVAS) network to monitor AEFI by collecting survey data. An Epoch Times analysis of data collected by CANVAS showed that for 1,173,748 COVID-19 vaccine doses administered and surveyed, there were 3,276 reported “serious health events” that required emergency department visits or hospitalization.

Back in July 2023, Dr. Celia Lourenco, acting associate assistant deputy minister with Health Canada, also said the agency expected there to be “a lot of underreporting” of COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

“It doesn’t get reported to the regulator, so that’s a common problem,” she said during a Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board hearing, adding that the phenomenon exists across many countries.

Health Canada concurred with Ms. Lourenco’s statement in a previous email to The Epoch Times, noting that most pre-pandemic studies on the topic estimate “adverse drug reaction under-reporting rates of 90 percent or higher.”

Department spokesperson Nicholas Janveau said underreporting of vaccine injuries happens in both voluntary and mandatory reporting systems, and that it is typical for milder events to be underreported in the absence of heightened public awareness and media reporting.