Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday announced a plan to shake up the nation’s compensation system for people harmed by vaccines.
The federal system, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, “is broken, and I intend to fix it,” Mr. Kennedy wrote on X. “I will not allow the V.I.C.P. to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals.”
The compensation program, created by Congress in 1986, allows people who believe they were injured by vaccines to apply for financial compensation. The system is operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, with federally appointed special masters serving as judges, and funded by a 75-cent surcharge on vaccines.
Mr. Kennedy said he was working with Attorney General Pam Bondi on the effort to remake the system but did not provide details.
Mr. Kennedy noted that the compensation program protects vaccine makers from liability in courts. He said that the compensation fund has paid out $5.4 billion to 12,000 petitioners, but argued that it “no longer functions to achieve its Congressional intent.”
The program is inefficient and corrupt, Mr. Kennedy said in his lengthy online post, and he charged that judges were prioritizing “the solvency of the H.H.S. Trust Fund, over their duty to compensate victims.”
Mr. Kennedy told the right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson last month that he had hired a person at H.H.S. who would “be revolutionizing” the vaccine compensation program. “We’re looking at ways to enlarge that program so that Covid vaccine-injured people can be compensated,” the secretary added.
Agency records show that H.H.S. has hired Andrew Downing, a lawyer from Arizona who has brought a number of cases before the compensation court.
Among them were more than 30 cases claiming harm from the Gardasil vaccine against the human papilloma virus, court records show. Mr. Kennedy’s financial interest in that litigation caused fireworks at his confirmation hearing, and he later signed over his stake in the case to an adult son.
Though the compensation system is widely regarded as flawed and understaffed, critics have noted Mr. Kennedy’s lengthy record as a vaccine skeptic and view his campaign to remake the vaccine court with concern.
Mr. Kennedy could use the effort as a platform to further erode trust in vaccines, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied the program.
“It’s setting them up for changes that will make the program compensate cases out of hand without actually evaluating the cases, including cases that are almost certainly false,” she said.
Mr. Kennedy and his close allies have pressed cases in the compensation court and in other courts for years, including a trial in 2022 in which Mr. Kennedy gave a closing argument. The case sought to hold a doctor liable for causing autism by vaccinating a boy. The jury sided with the doctor.
Mr. Kennedy has long complained that there is no liability in a standard court for vaccine injuries.
“No matter how reckless the company is, no matter how toxic the product, no matter how egregious your injury, you cannot sue them,” Mr. Kennedy said on Mr. Carlson’s show. “And that’s one of the problems.”
Christina Jewett covers the Food and Drug Administration, which means keeping a close eye on drugs, medical devices, food safety and tobacco policy.
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