----- Original Message ----- From: "Edda West" <eddawest@netidea.com> To: "John" <whaleto@btinternet.com> Sent: Friday, May 24, 2002 10:26 PM Subject: reply from edda -

Re: vaccine injury payouts in Canada

Hi John, The big problem in Canada is that health services are under provincial jurisdiction, not the federal government, who only doles out money to the provinces. Right now, only one province in Canada - Quebec has paid out anything to vaccine injury victims, and at that, very small amounts. Quebec established a 'no-fault' compensation scheme in 1987. They have a 3 member committee that evaluates claims. According to Catheirne Diodati's book, "Quebec has addressed between 10 & 20 percent of the approximately 140 claims submitted (to Sept.1999), paying out about $2,028,600 in compensation thus far. Half of the settled claims have gone to OPV contacts and a large majority of the remainder have gone to DPT vaccine injury victims."

But in the rest of Canada, NOTHING. Federal and provincial health ministries conspire to keep a tight lid on vaccine injuries. Their main strategy is denial and hiding being the "C" word, coincidence. Also, it's interesting to note that the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) guidelines as to what determines an adverse reaction, directly contradicts what is published in the product monographs. We can trace the history of when they made an abrupt turn from acknowledging and recognizing adverse reactions, and being cautious about revaccinating who had reacted to when they literally threw out all the cautionary guidelines and declared that an anaphylactic reaction immediately after vaccination is the only contraindication accepted now.

Anyway, there have been no successful lawsuits in this country to date - so we are quite excited about the 2 new class actions that have been filed - one against Aventis for mercury in DPT vaccines and the other against GlaxoSmithKline & Merck for hepatitis B.

The few lawsuits that have started have all been boggled and stalled by pharmaceutical maneuverings, costing the poor victimized families enormous amounts of money, but going absolutely nowhere. The best known two cases are the Dignazio and Graham families in Winnipeg Manitoba, and their lawyer just dropped them a couple of months ago. I'm hoping that they will qualify for this new class action suit that has been started by Vancouver law firm Klein Lyons...........anyway it's a long long road ahead. As I said in my update to Sheri, Canada is in the dark ages in terms of compensation, preferring to use every dirty trick in the books to make sure vaccine injury victims get absolutely nowhere.