Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The one I am interested in asking about is Pandemrix and narcolepsy. I want to put a couple of things on record to give context. On 19 May 2009, Dr. Brendan Corcoran, on behalf of the State, signed a contract for the provision of Pandemrix. In October or November 2009, the State distributed leaflets to patients and a different one to health professionals which claimed that Pandemrix was as safe as the ordinary flu vaccine and that it was clinically tested. From my research, that statement appears to have been false and has been accepted as false since. In 2012, Dr. Darina O'Flanagan, the then director of the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, at the request of the Government, produced a report which found that there was a thirteenfold higher risk of narcolepsy in vaccinated children compared with unvaccinated children, in particular between the ages of five and 19. The then Minister for Health and now Senator James Reilly stated: "This report is a start in understanding the association between the vaccine and narcolepsy. However, our main focus is on the people affected and their families." Last year, the Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, alluded to the fact that his officials were looking at a compensation scheme for side effects from important vaccines. The origin of that statement is the steering group on vaccines which goes back to 2001. The health committee recommended certain things, and the vaccine damage steering group was set up in 2007 and reported in 2009.

Then, as I said, the Minister, Deputy Harris, was saying in 2017 that he was looking at a compensation scheme. Again, anecdotal evidence would suggest, and I will ask both the Department of Health and perhaps Mr. Breen to answer this, that in some of these 80 cases there has been a delay in discovery of up to two years and that State money in defending that discovery has run to more than €2 million. Does Mr. Breen concur with that?