Dhe hopes of the four plaintiffs were dashed early on. After just a short hearing, the medical liability chamber of the Düsseldorf Regional Court dismissed the man and three women’s claims for damages and compensation for pain and suffering against the vaccine manufacturers Biontech and Moderna. A procedure in the Moderna case ended with a default judgment because the plaintiff’s lawyers did not submit any applications according to the chamber’s legal explanations – from the lawyers’ point of view, there was still too little information about the vaccine’s manufacturing process.
In the Biontech case, the court decided on Thursday afternoon that the plaintiffs had not adequately justified that their respective health problems – including exhaustion, severe concentration problems, autoimmune reactions, loss of vision, breathing and lung problems or symptoms of myocarditis – were due to the vaccinations. In addition, they were unable to adequately substantiate their argument that Biontech had provided inaccurate or inadequate information about side effects for its vaccine based on the messenger molecule RNA.
The chamber did not consider the eligibility requirements under the Medicines Act to be met because the plaintiffs could not substantiate their claim that the vaccines had a negative benefit-risk balance. Rather, the opposite follows from the fact that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has approved the vaccine. As part of the EMA review, a positive benefit-risk balance was determined several times. The court saw no reason to “actually and legally review” the EMA procedure. The plaintiff’s lawyer announced an appeal to the Higher Regional Court.
The Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) published a final report on corona vaccine damage in March. Of the more than 192 million Covid-19 vaccinations carried out in Germany, there was suspicion of damage in less than one case per 100,000 vaccinations. If those affected complain, they face the problem that the possible health impairments listed by the PEI can also have causes other than a Covid vaccination. Similar proceedings are currently pending in several German courts. As in Düsseldorf, in some cases lawsuits have already been dismissed in the first instance, for example by the regional courts in Kleve, Mainz, Rottweil and Bayreuth.
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