The court has determined that the government should compensate a man in his 20s who developed a rare neurological disorder, suspected to be Guillain-Barré Syndrome, after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. According to the legal community on the 3rd, the Seoul Administrative Court’s Administrative Division 8, presided over by Chief Judge Yang Soon-joo, recently ruled in favor of plaintiff A, who filed a lawsuit against the head of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) to cancel the agency’s refusal to compensate for adverse vaccination effects.
A received the AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccine on March 4, 2021, and experienced side effects such as fever, vomiting, and muscle pain. He was later clinically diagnosed with acute transverse myelitis and finally with Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
Despite applying for compensation, the KDCA rejected his claim, citing insufficient evidence to prove a causal relationship between the vaccine and the adverse reaction according to compensation review standards. However, they supported him with 26.54 million KRW in medical expenses under a support program for suspected related diseases.
A proceeded with a lawsuit, and the court ruled that “the disabilities in this case can be presumed to have resulted from the COVID-19 vaccination, making the KDCA’s decision to refuse compensation unlawful and should be revoked.”
The court referenced a Supreme Court precedent stating that a causal relationship could be presumed if there is a close temporal connection between vaccination and the onset of disabilities unless other special circumstances exist, and it is not impossible, based on medical theories or empirical rules, to infer that the disability resulted from the vaccination. Furthermore, the disability should not have an unknown cause or be attributable to something other than the vaccine.
The court noted that symptoms began approximately 10 hours after the vaccination, establishing a close temporal relationship, and considering studies indicating an increased risk of the syndrome from the vaccine, it was not impossible to infer a causal relationship based on medical theories or empirical rules.
A, who was a 25-year-old young man without previous neurological symptoms, received the vaccine at the hospital where he worked as an occupational therapist, having cooperated with national health guidelines, which also factored into consideration.
The court criticized the KDCA’s compensation review standards, suggesting that uniformly denying causality when evidence is insufficient misreads the Supreme Court’s rulings. It argued that suspected diseases with possible causal links, as suggested by statistically relevant institutions domestically and internationally, could be deemed as having a presumable causal relationship.