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Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said yesterday that he intends to "fix" a government program that compensates people with vaccine injuries.
The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was established by Congress in 1986 to protect vaccine makers from most lawsuits alleging vaccine-related injury, while also giving people who believe they were injured by vaccines an opportunity to have their claims heard and potentially receive compensation from HHS. According to the Health Resources & Services Administration, VICP has paid more than $5.4 billion in awards for harm over the life of the program.
But in a post yesterday on X, Kennedy said that the structure of the VICP hobbles claimants because HHS (rather than the vaccine makers) is the defendant and that it routinely dismisses meritorious cases or drags them out for years. Kennedy said he is working with US Attorney General Pam Bondi to fix the program.
"The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it," Kennedy said. "I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals."
Kennedy's plans are unclear
Though Kennedy's post did not provide any details on changes he plans to make to the VICP, observers are concerned that it could be an attempt to further reshape US vaccine policy. A longtime critic of vaccines, Kennedy has already overhauled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replacing the board's 17 vaccine experts with seven new members, some of whom share his views on vaccines.
Among the concerns is that Kennedy wants to expand the eligibility for compensation by allowing claimants to sue for adverse events that haven't been shown to be associated with vaccines.
"There are improvements needed to the program, but that’s not what the Secretary wants to do," Dorit Reiss, PhD, a law professor at the University of California Law, San Francisco, wrote on the Skeptical Raptor blog. "He wants to serve the anti-vaccine agenda by making the program compensate cases not caused by the vaccines."