Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , on Monday announced on X that he intends to reform the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).
The program was established as part of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. The Act, and subsequent court decisions, acknowledged that vaccines, like all other medicines, can cause injuries and even death.
In his X post, Kennedy noted that vaccines are described in law as “unavoidably unsafe.” Congress established VICP, which obliged HHS to compensate injured children.
Kennedy noted that his uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, stated, “when … children are the victims of an appropriate and rational national policy, a compassionate government will assist them in their hour of need.”
But the VICP has not lived up to the promise of the 1986 Act.
As Kennedy put it, “The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it. I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals.”
The respondent to a vaccine injury claim is the Department of Health and Human Services. The major pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna and Merck which profit enormously from vaccines do not have to defend their products in the “Vaccine Court.”
Big Pharma does not pay for vaccine injuries – taxpayers do – through a 75-cent surcharge collected per vaccine administered in the U.S.
Kennedy noted that VICP appears to worry more about the balance sheet of the trust fund than the need to fairly compensate the vaccine injured. In his book, The Vaccine Court, author Wayne Rohde details the labyrinth of problems blocking parents of injured children from receiving compensation to get the care they need for their injured child.
Referring to the bureaucracy within the Civil Torts Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, Kennedy writes, “Claimants are therefore facing the monumental power and bottomless pockets of the U.S. government.”
At Vaccine Injury Court, judges do not preside over cases; Special Masters do. As Kennedy points out, “they come from government, legal, or political posts, and typically display an extreme bias that favors the government side. There is no discovery, and the rules of evidence do not apply.”
Kennedy further noted that the Vaccine Court does not “allow children’s attorneys access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a taxpayer-funded CDC surveillance system that houses the best data on vaccine injuries.”
This creates an uneven playing field, Kennedy said, one in which petitioner attorneys only get paid if and when Special Masters and DOJ attorneys decide.
The program was intended to resolve cases fairly and quickly, but as Kennedy notes in his X post, cases often drag on for years.
In a book titled Vaccine Injuries, co-written by Louis Conte and MAHA Action president Tony Lyons, we documented the truth about the long grueling process that the vaccine injured and their families go through when they bring cases into the program.
“The VICP routinely dismisses meritorious cases outright or drags them out for years,” Kennedy writes. “Instead of ‘quickly and fairly’ awarding compensation, Special Masters, hired by a Judge to make their jobs easier, dismiss over half of the cases. Most of those that proceed typically take 5+ years to resolve, with many languishing for more than 10 years as parents struggle to care for children suffering with often extreme disabilities.”
Kennedy points to the unfair treatment of petitioners’ expert witnesses, who often, as he writes, “suffer intimidation and even threats that they will lose professional status or NIH funding if they testify for injured children.”
Continues Kennedy, “The government pays its own medical expert witnesses promptly while simultaneously slow-walking payments for petitioners’ experts—sometimes for years.”
The Vaccine Court, and the VICP, both desperately need an overhaul. They are America’s ultimate secret court, where every decision is carefully word-smithed while vaccine injuries are concealed and the public is kept in the dark.
The VICP has not served children, but it has allowed Big Pharma to shift the cost of vaccine injury to you – the taxpayer.
