US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr says he plans to tweak the country’s compensation system for people harmed by vaccines, noting that in its current format, it merely protects vaccine makers from liability, and needs to be reworked.
The compensation fund has paid out $5.4bn to 12 000 petitioners, but Kennedy has described it as “inefficient and corrupt”, arguing that it “no longer functions to achieve its Congressional intent”.
“The Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme is broken, and I intend to fix it,” he wrote on X. “I will not allow it to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals.”
The New York Times reports that the compensation programme, created 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.
Kennedy said he was working with Attorney-General Pam Bondi on the effort to remake the system but did not provide details. He added that the programme protects vaccine makers from liability in courts, and that judges were prioritising “the solvency of the HHS Trust Fund over their duty to compensate victims”.
Last month he was quoted as saying he had hired someone for the HHS who would be “revolutionising” the programme.
“We’re looking at ways to enlarge it so that Covid vaccine-injured people can be compensated,” the secretary added.
Agency records show that the department 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. 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 Kennedy’s lengthy record as a vaccine sceptic and view, with concern, his campaign to remake the vaccine court.
He 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 programme.
“It’s setting them up for changes that will make the programme compensate cases out of hand without actually evaluating the cases, including cases that are almost certainly false,” she said.
Kennedy has long been vocal about there being 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,” he has previously said. “And that’s one of the problems.
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