After taking aim at the United States’ vaccine safety reporting system earlier this year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has added a federal vaccine injury compensation program to his list of immunization bugbears. And this time around, the HHS Secretary says he already has a team working on a potential overhaul.
“We just brought in a guy this week who’s going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program,” Kennedy said during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday.
Kennedy rebuked the no-fault system underpinning the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), which was established in 1988 through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. The program was designed as a spike in lawsuits against vaccine companies threatened to cause vaccine shortages and disease resurgences, according to a Human Resources & Services Administration fact page on the program.
“No matter how reckless that company is, no matter how toxic the product, no matter how egregious your injury, you cannot sue them,” Kennedy said of the program in its current form.
Under the NVICP framework (PDF) today, a vaccine injury petition must be filed within three years of the first symptom of the alleged injury, or within two years of death and four years after the first symptom of an alleged injury that resulted in death. If compensation is awarded, claimants receive a payout through a trust fund that is kept afloat via surcharges on recommended vaccines, rather than from vaccine makers themselves.
Only vaccines that have been recommended for routine administration to kids and pregnant women by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are included in NVCIP. The program doesn’t include COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries, though similar claims for COVID shots can still be submitted through the U.S.’ Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).
Despite the ability to submit COVID-19 vaccine claims through CICP, Kennedy stressed during his interview that he wants to expand NVCIP “so that COVID vaccine injured people can be compensated.” The HHS secretary also expressed a desire to extend the program’s current statute of limitations beyond its current three years.
Kennedy says he “brought in a team” this week to work on potential changes to the compensation program.
A spokesperson for the HHS did not immediately respond to Fierce Pharma’s request for comment on Kennedy’s statements and plans. The HHS secretary’s ability to make sweeping changes to NVCIP without congressional action is unclear, STAT News pointed out.
Nevertheless, Kennedy has already successfully wielded his influence over U.S. vaccine policy in his new role, despite reported pledges during his confirmation hearing to leave vaccine recommendations alone.
Perhaps most notably, Kennedy last month fired all 17 former sitting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices over conflict-of-interest allegations, replacing them with handpicked—and at times controversial—new members who met last week to issue recommendations on a number of shots.
Kennedy’s ACIP struck an immediate blow to established vaccine policy, recommending against the use of flu shots that use the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal.
Thimerosal has long been a target of anti-vaccine activists who’ve linked the ingredient to the development of autism, though multiple studies, including one by the CDC itself, have debunked that link.
In reference to the ACIP purge last month, Kennedy told Carlson that the CDC panel was little more than a “sock puppet for the industry that it was supposed to regulate.”
Kennedy also used the pulpit on Carlson’s show to level criticism against the HHS’ Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and re-up his pledge to make sweeping changes to the system.
“We’re going to absolutely change VAERS and we’re going to create—either within VAERS or supplementary to VAERS—a system that actually works,” Kennedy said.
As in previous interviews and speeches, Kennedy linked the abundance of recommended pediatric vaccines to the prevalence of conditions like diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism in the U.S.
“That’s a lot of vaccines for a kid, and each one of those is designed to permanently alter your immune system, and so we have now this epidemic of immune dysregulation in our country,” he said. “And there’s no way to rule out vaccines as one of the key culprits.”
Apart from last week’s thimerosal vote, Kennedy’s new-look ACIP has also proposed new subcommittees to examine the cumulative effect of childhood vaccine schedules and to assess shots that haven’t been subject to review in more than seven years.