In a post on X, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alleged that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has “devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised to “fix” the U.S.’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and return it to its “original Congressional intent,” in an X post on Monday.
The VICP was established under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which sought to create a method besides lawsuits that patients could use to seek relief from the rare instances of injuries and complications that stem from being immunized with a vaccine. In the 1980s, vaccine makers faced enough lawsuits from families of children who’d received certain vaccines that one company left the U.S. altogether and vaccine shortages ensued.
In his post, however, Kennedy claimed that the VICP has since strayed from this original intent and “devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption,” without offering specifics.
Kennedy took issue with the “structure itself” of the VICP, which he claimed “hobbles claimants.” The VICP sets the HHS as the defendant these injury claims, not the vaccine developers themselves. “Claimants are therefore facing the monumental power and bottomless pockets of the U.S. government,” Kennedy said, contending that “there is no discovery, and the rules of evidence do not apply” during the process. Kennedy has previously made similar claims against the VICP.
The result, according to Kennedy, is that the VCIP typically ends up dismissing otherwise “meritorious cases” or “drags them out for years.” The Secretary plans to work with HHS staff and Attorney General Pam Bondi to address these problems at the VICP, though he did not say what steps he intends to take.
Drastic changes to the VICP, however, could imperil vaccine supply in the U.S. and chase companies away, according to a July 17 report from ProPublica, which noted that vaccine developers could pull out of the U.S. for fear of being exposed to legal risk.
The VICP is Kennedy’s latest target in what has been a months-long quest to overhaul vaccine policy in the country. In May, the Secretary, supported by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, removed routine COVID-19 vaccination from the CDC’s guidelines for healthy children and healthy pregnant women.
“There’s no evidence healthy kids need [repeat COVID-19 vaccination] today, and most countries have stopped recommending it for children,” Makary said in a video announcement at the time. Earlier this month, a coalition of professional organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Physicians sued Kennedy, claiming that such a change to the CDC’s vaccination policy is a “baseless and uninformed policy decision.”
In June, Kennedy pulled the U.S.’s funding to the global vaccine alliance Gavi, claiming that the group minimized safety concerns surrounding COVID-19 vaccines. “When the science was inconvenient, Gavi ignored the science,” Kennedy alleged without evidence in a video statement at the time.
