Introduction
Until recently, the Spanish courts had neither applied nor
referenced the 21 June 2017 ruling by the European Court of Justice
(ECJ) on the Hepatitis B vaccine. However, that changed in June and
July 2019 when the Spanish National Court handed down judgments in
two separate cases (for alleged damages following administration of
an HPV vaccine), both of which referred to and interpreted the ECJ
ruling. This article provides an overview of the conclusions
reached by the National Court, as well as the potential
implications of its interpretations of the 2017 ECJ judgment.
The 2017 ECJ judgment summarised
By way of background, the European Court of Justice concluded in
2017 that when medical evidence neither establishes nor rules out
the existence of a link between a vaccine's administration and
the occurrence of a disease, the existence of a causal link between
the defect attributed to the vaccine and the damage suffered by the
victim could be
