By Miranda Devine, Published Nov. 12, 2023, The New York Post Opinion
The Justice Department has just posted a new jobs ad — it’s looking for eight new attorneys to defend the federal government in vaccine injury cases.
Presumably, the hiring spree is in anticipation of a surge of COVID vaccine lawsuits, as people who were forced by government mandates to take the jab, and suffered serious side effects as a result, try to extract compensation from a system that is stacked against them.
“The office is currently expanding to address workload created by an increase in cases filed under the Vaccine Act,” reads the ad posted by the Torts Branch of the DOJ on the USAJobs website.
The recruitment drive comes on the heels of a little-noticed lawsuit filed in Louisiana last month by six vaccine-injured plaintiffs against the federal government.
The suit aims to overturn the legal immunity that pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Moderna enjoy on their COVID shots.
Not that any of the lawyers involved expect Big Pharma to pay up, but at least if they win, it should force Congress to reform inadequate vaccine injury compensation schemes that were instituted almost 40 years ago as an alternative to suing drug companies out of existence but that have not kept up with the times.
Mandates and misery
Meanwhile, almost 13,000 Americans who claim the COVID vaccine caused them or their dead loved ones adverse reactions — such as the life-threatening heart ailment myocarditis or the debilitating immune disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome — remain in limbo after doing what they were told was “the right thing”: heeding government mandates to submit to the jab.
The unaccountable, understaffed government tribunal that presides over the so-called Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), for vaccines administered under emergency measures, is a “kangaroo court,” says the lawsuit filed by attorney Aaron Siri, partner at New York firm Siri & Glimstad.
“The CICP is akin to a Potemkin village … an elaborate façade designed to hide an undesirable reality.
“Claims are consistently lost, ignored, denied, or caught up in the years-long purgatory of government bureaucracy. The compensation, if any, is neither timely nor adequate.”
Just six people had been compensated by October this year, of more than 12,775 COVID injury claims submitted to the CICP since Jan. 31, 2020, when the Trump administration declared a public health emergency.
Those lucky people reportedly received an average of $2,148 each.
Of the 1,800 decisions made by the CICP, just 72 have been found eligible for compensation. Another 1,728 have been denied.
That means 96 percent of claims are unsuccessful, and just 14 percent of total claims have even been adjudicated.
Tragic jab cases
Among the plaintiffs in the Louisiana case is Emma Burkey, who was a healthy 18-year-old Nevada high school student when she received the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine in April 2021 and suffered a devastating brain injury.
“Now, after three brain surgeries and thousands of hours of physical therapy, she struggles to walk, write, and care for herself,” says the lawsuit.
Victim advocacy group React-19, which has joined the plaintiffs, also represents Ernest Ramirez, a car wash technician in a small South Texas town who lost his only son, Ernest Jr., a healthy 16-year-old athlete who died of a heart attack five days after receiving his first Pfizer dose in April 2021.
The weeping testimony of the single father at a congressional hearing in Washington, DC, in November that year was heartrending.
“I’ve raised my boy since he was a baby,” said Ramirez. “Me and my son have never been apart. He was my best friend … We got the Pfizer vaccine because I thought it was the right thing to do. It was like playing Russian roulette. My government lied to me. They said it was safe. Now I go home to an empty house …
“I love the hell out of my country but I don’t trust my government anymore.”
Ramirez couldn’t even grieve in peace. Twitter censored the photo he posted of his son’s coffin under the caption: “My good byes to my Baby Boy” and three broken heart emojis, and GoFundMe deleted his account to raise money for the trip to Washington.
His tragedy was an inconvenient truth for a government hellbent on forcing Americans to take the jab, whether they needed it or not.
Critics demonized
With more than 650 million COVID vaccine doses administered in the US, the tragic side effects suffered by Emma Burkey and Ernest Ramirez Jr. might be rare, but that doesn’t reduce the suffering of the victims and their families.
They were censored on social media at the behest of the federal government and were demonized by the media as “anti-vaxxers” and conspiracy theorists.
“It is not a conspiracy,” says attorney Siri, pointing out the folly of branding his clients “anti-vaxxers” when they actually took the vaccine.
“It is economic forces and conflicts run amok with no material monetary interests pushing back for decades. The class action and product liability attorneys have been neutered.”
In other words, when Big Pharma gets immunity from being sued, the normal market forces that ensure a product is safe are turned on their head. It stands to reason greed might get a say.
Is it any wonder that just 2 percent of Americans have taken the latest COVID booster, according to figures released last month by HHS, a sign of rock-bottom faith in public health advice.
More concerning is that vaccine hesitancy has spread to life-saving childhood vaccines, with the CDC reporting the highest exemption rate in history.
After pushing so much disinformation about masks, lockdowns and the COVID jab, and then imposing Soviet levels of censorship on dissenting voices, the federal government and its pet medicos, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, are entirely to blame for the collapse in public trust that will haunt us for a generation.