Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned the safety of vaccines, is planning a broad federal effort to address vaccine injuries, including a new research clinic at the National Institutes of Health and a new billing code to reimburse doctors for filing reports of serious vaccine side effects, according to multiple people familiar with the initiative.
Mr. Kennedy talked about the initiative when he and other top health officials made an unannounced visit to the N.I.H. in Bethesda, Md., earlier this week — his first trip there as secretary — to meet with patients who believe they have been injured by vaccines, according to the people, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment about the initiative. A spokesman for Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the N.I.H. director, declined comment. Some details of the initiative were earlier reported by Bloomberg.
Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to focus government resources on vaccine injuries comes as vaccine-preventable diseases, including measles, are rising in the United States because of falling vaccination rates.
Like all drugs, vaccines cause side effects, but public health experts say the benefits far outweigh the risks for most people. The World Health Organization estimated in 2024 that global immunization efforts have saved 154 million lives over the past half-century. Vaccines have wiped out smallpox and mostly relegated polio to the history books.
Although injuries are rare, vaccine experts generally support close monitoring and continued study of side effects. Many are wary of Mr. Kennedy’s motivations, however, and they say that until more details of the initiative are known, it is impossible to say whether or not it will be a legitimate exercise in science.
The N.I.H. described the new effort in two little-noticed documents posted on its website in June. The so-called “highlighted topics” notices alerted prospective investigators that the health department “in collaboration with N.I.H., will investigate vaccine injuries with improved data collection and analysis, including through a new vaccine injury research program at the N.I.H. Clinical Center that may expand to centers around the country.”
Mr. Kennedy has made vaccine safety a cornerstone of his tenure as health secretary, despite decades of research showing serious vaccine side effects are rare. Much of his work has focused on a purported link between vaccines and autism, though numerous studies have failed to show such a link. The Trump administration has poured millions into autism research, including funding studies that independent researchers have praised as legitimate academic science.
Mr. Kennedy has long argued that chemicals in vaccines, including mercury and aluminum salts, are dangerous. Experts say there is no evidence that either are harmful.
He has also suggested, without evidence, that vaccines are linked to chronic disease, and has complained that there are no long-term studies about the effects of vaccination. One of the N.I.H. “highlighted topics” announcements calls for large-scale evaluations of vaccines and “their relationships with both positive and negative long-term health outcomes across the lifespan.”
Last month, officials at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences proposed to fund a broad-based initiative to examine chemical exposures in the environment, and described the plan to a meeting of outside advisers.
The proposal does not explicitly state that the research will relate to vaccines. But one of its goals is “advancing understanding of aluminum, including aluminum-containing compounds encountered through environmental, consumer product, occupational and medically relevant exposures,” and one person familiar with the work said that vaccine research could be a part of it.
Vaccine experts are skeptical of Mr. Kennedy’s focus on well-studied topics like autism and metals. But they also see the need for additional vaccine safety research.
“I do think that we do need to take these adverse events more seriously, and I think that we need to build that into how we fund scientific research in the future,” said Dr. Helen Chu, who was a member of an outside panel of experts that advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines until last spring, when Mr. Kennedy fired everyone on the committee.
“We need to think about if there are serious adverse events that are occurring from certain vaccines, how do we make sure that these are studied appropriately so that we understand what leads to them, so that we can design safer vaccines in the future,” she said.
Dr. Daniel Salmon, who leads the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, agreed. “More research in vaccine safety would be very helpful,” he said, adding, “It needs to be rigorous science.”
Patients who suffer vaccine injuries often say they feel dismissed by the medical establishment and have been pleading for the government to do more.
One of the patients who met with Mr. Kennedy at the N.I.H. was Brianne Dressen, who participated in a clinical trial of a Covid-19 vaccine made by AstraZeneca, which was withdrawn from the market in 2024 after concerns about a link between the shot and an extremely rare but serious blood clotting disorder lowered demand.
Ms. Dressen, a former preschool teacher from Utah declined to talk about the meeting with Mr. Kennedy but she described her own experience in an interview with The New York Times.
Within an hour of receiving the AstraZeneca shot in November 2020, she said, her limbs began tingling. Her symptoms, including pain, worsened over the following weeks and months. She had to use a wheelchair for a time, and lost 40 pounds. In January 2021, she reached out to experts at the N.I.H. Clinical Center, a hospital devoted entirely to clinical research. Doctors there diagnosed her with “post-vaccine neuropathy,” she said.
She has sued AstraZeneca; the case is still pending. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on the litigation.
Ms. Dressen later turned to advocacy and founded React19, to support research into Covid vaccine side effects and long-term symptoms from Covid. She says she is not political.
“This is the first time there’s been anything even remotely official,” she said.
Mr. Kennedy’s vaccine agenda has been extremely controversial and polarizing; the White House instructed him for a time not to talk about the issue, for fear it would harm Republicans’ chances in the midterm elections next month. In February, he began emphasizing his “Eat Real Food” agenda and pivoted away from vaccines.
It is not clear why his visit to the N.I.H. was a secret. He was accompanied on Monday by Dr. Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Dr. Erica Schwartz, the new head of the C.D.C., and Kyle Diamantas, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
The entire Bethesda campus was encouraged to work from home. An email warned of “increased traffic and security,” without saying why.
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