BioNTech is facing a barrage of compensation claims in Germany brought by two law firms alleging that their customers suffered permanent health damage from the company’s coronavirus vaccine.
On Monday, the Mainz-based drugmaker will face its first hearing in a German court over the allegations in a case brought on behalf of a middle-aged medical worker.
It is seeking €150,000 in compensation for symptoms including irregular heartbeat and brain fog that it says were caused after receiving the vaccine.
The challenge, in a regional court in Hamburg, is one of several hundred claims for damages of up to one million euros being brought by the two law firms.
The most prominent of these, Dusseldorf-based Rogert & Ulbrich, is headed by Tobias Ulbrich, a specialist in transportation and shipping law who has criticized vaccine makers on social media.
The other company is Cäsar-Preller, also based in Mainz.
The companies have successfully won consumer compensation from German carmaker Volkswagen over its diesel emissions scandal.
Given that nearly three-quarters of the 224 million doses of vaccine administered in Germany were produced by BioNTech in collaboration with Pfizer, the vast majority of claims are being brought against the Mainz-based company, which pioneered the use of mRNA in Vaccines.
The German cases represent the largest number of compensation claims BioNTech has faced worldwide since it became famous during the pandemic.
Ulbrich is a controversial figure, who claimed that US billionaire Bill Gates wanted to use vaccination to bring Germany’s population down to 27 million people – a claim a spokesperson for his foundation said was “false”.
Ulbrich also claimed that blood tests on some of his clients showed they had “Vaccine Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome” or “V-AIDS” — a syndrome that eminent scientists say is not real.
The lawyer told the Financial Times that German media reports portraying him as a conspiracy theorist showed he was “doing a good job” of scaring off pharmaceutical companies.
Peer-reviewed studies have shown that side effects from Covid-19 vaccines are rare but do exist, including four types of neurological complications and an enlarged heart known as myocarditis.
But listed BioNTech said it was confident the cases would be dismissed, pointing to the fact that it decided not to set aside rulings to cover potential compensation claims.
“Continuous monitoring of the vaccine’s safety profile and after more than 2.6 billion doses of (Covid-19 vaccine) administered worldwide has not yet identified potential side effects other than those already listed in the respective product information,” BioNTech said.
The company added that in the Hamburg case, the plaintiff and her attorneys failed to prove a “causal relationship between adverse events and the vaccine” rather than a causal one and called the lawsuit “without merit”.
Ulbrich maintains that the burden of proof – as well as potential compensation – is lower in Germany than elsewhere and he is confident his clients’ cases are strong, especially at hearings in Munich and Düsseldorf.
The ruling against BioNTech is likely to have limited direct financial damage to the company because of the EU legal shield that largely shields vaccine makers from legal liability if they cause unexpected side effects, leaving national governments on the hook instead.
However, the firm has had to expand its use of additional law firms to handle the growing caseload.
Rogert, Ulbrich, and Kassar-Briller reject accusations that they prey on the fears of people with the disease but have little chance of winning a successful legal challenge for their own financial gain.
They say the fees they can charge in most cases are set at around €7,000 and are often paid through their clients’ insurance. “It’s expensive,” said Joachim Cäsar-Preller, owner of Cäsar-Preller. “We have a great team. Half of the money goes to court.”
Additional reporting by Hannah Koechler