المسؤولية المدنية الناشئة عن اللقاح (دراسة مقارنة)

Civil liability arising from the vaccine “ A comparative study ”

Abstract

Vaccines are one of the ten most important public health achievements of the twentieth century, as they have contributed to protecting people’s lives in an effective and efficient manner. They have had the greatest pride in eliminating many infectious diseases that have exhausted the human race. by favor of this vital product, talk of serious diseases such as smallpox and polio has become a thing of the past.
However, vaccines, like all other medical products, are inherently dangerous products, and this danger is sometimes unavoidable. Therefore, the vaccine recipient must bear part of the damage caused by the harmful side effects of the vaccine, such as injection pain, skin swelling and redness, and high body temperature. However, some of these side effects are extremely dangerous and lead to serious damage to the recipient, which raises the question of who bears responsibility for the negative harmful damages arising from the vaccine and whether the rules governing objective liability for products are sufficient to compensate those affected by vaccines, or whether there is a need to bypass these provisions and establish special rules, especially since vaccines, unlike other products, are given to healthy people to prevent diseases that remain a possibility for them to infect.
Through a comparative analytical study of legal systems that dealt with civil liability arising from the vaccine in different ways, some were satisfied with the general rules of civil liability, others subjected that liability to the special rules of product liability, and finally, some systems established a special legal system for liability for vaccines.
The study concluded that it is necessary to strike a balance between conflicting interests saying that the company is absolutely responsible for all damages resulting from the vaccine may lead to unacceptable results that would affect investment in the field of vaccine manufacturing and production. Therefore, some legislations have tried to resort to administrative remedies and hold the state responsible for compensating for vaccine damages instead of the manufacturing companies. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a new type of compensation emerged, which is international compensation for damages resulting from the Covid-19 vaccine.
As a result of imposing mandatory vaccinations and the subsequent emergence of the state’s responsibility for mandatory vaccination, which gave rise to administrative responsibility alongside the original responsibility, which is civil responsibility, it was necessary to establish rules regulating the judicial jurisdiction of both the administrative judiciary and the civil judiciary in ruling on damages arising from the negative harmful effects of the vaccine and to establish a standard to determine their scope. The study concluded that the laws subject to comparison allowed the emergence of administrative responsibility alongside civil responsibility, with a difference in the content of this regulation.