More on the ECJ Vaccine Liability Decision

By Alex Stein

My friend and mentor, the former Israeli Chief Justice Aharon Barak, used to say that when neither side likes the court’s decision, chances are that the court was right. This is likely to be the case with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision on vaccine manufacturers’ liability, N.W. et al. v. Sanofi Pasteur MSD, C‑621/15. Popular press reacted to this decision with sharp criticism that included unsubstantiated assertions about the European law of products liability, about what the Court did and did not say, and about the economics of vaccines. My short blog-post, which appeared here, offered a more positive (and hopefully more informative) assessment of this decision and its implications. I argued that the decision was balanced and well grounded in the principles of evidence and products liability. The follow-ups and subsequent analyses that appeared in Nature, Science and Hipertextual (in Spanish) have largely vindicated the decision (while citing some of its critics alongside the decision’s supporters such as myself).

To remove any remaining confusion about the implications of the ECJ decision, I thought I should clarify the Court’s statement that a vaccine liability suit can only succeed when the plaintiff proves that the vaccine complained against was “defective” within the meaning of Article 6(1) of the European Council Directive on products liability (85/374/EEC) (the Directive). Critics of the Court’s decision have uniformly missed this important proviso. Read More

Vaccine Liability in Europe: A New Development

By Alex Stein

Yesterday, the European Court of Justice has issued an important ruling on vaccine manufacturers liability. N.W. et al. v. Sanofi Pasteur MSD, C‑621/15. This ruling triggered a hailstorm of criticism from different media outlets, including CNN. These outlets, however, have largely misreported the ruling and its underlying reasons, partly because of this misleading Press Release issued on behalf of the Court itself. In this post, I analyze the Court’s actual decision and briefly compare it with the American law.

The case at bar was about an adult patient who developed multiple sclerosis shortly after being vaccinated against Hepatitis B. The vaccination he received was manufactured by Sanofi Pasteur. Following the patient’s death from multiple sclerosis, his family filed a products liability suit against the company. The suit was filed in a French court, whose decision on evidentiary matters triggered a series of appeals that brought the case before the European Court of Justice. The Court was asked to determine whether the French evidentiary rule which allows plaintiffs to prove the vaccine’s defect and causation by “serious, specific and consistent evidence” in the absence of medical research in either direction aligns with the European law of products liability. The Court ruled that it does while making a number of clarifications and setting up conditions for such rules being valid under Article 4 of the European Council Directive 85/374/EEC of 25 July 1985. Read More