In his latest shakeup to health policy in the United States, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, notorious tanti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced his plan to make major changes to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, claiming in a lengthy manifesto on X that the program is corrupt and no longer serves its intended function.
VICP, which was established in 1986, creates an expedited process for people who claim to have been injured by vaccines to seek relief from a special “vaccine court,” paid for by a trust fund backed by a 75-cent surcharge on every vaccine. It was designed to prevent excessive litigation against pharmaceutical companies while still compensating people who were injured by vaccines.
“To date, the Vaccine Court has paid out $5.4 billion to 12,000 petitioners. But the VICP no longer functions to achieve its Congressional intent. Instead, the VICP has devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption as government lawyers and the Special Masters who serve as Vaccine Court judges prioritize the solvency of the HHS Trust Fund, over their duty to compensate victims,” wrote Kennedy. He complained that “government lawyers do not allow children’s attorneys access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a taxpayer-funded CDC surveillance system that houses the best data on vaccine injuries,” and that the special masters on the vaccine court are “notoriously biased” against claimants.
Medical experts, however, were quick to point out that much of what Kennedy said ranges from misleading to outright nonsense.
“His post includes many baldfaced lies, so I’m only posting the first part of it. The end result of this idiocy could well be that vaccine manufacturers will stop making vaccines here,” wrote Arizona-based epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs. “It is important to understand that he wants his law firm to make billions of dollars from suing vaccine companies. That is his sole motivation.”
“I’m not a typo snob or grammar police but in this case when you have staff and fact checkers maybe use them. Tweet from Secretary Kennedy about reforming the VICP,” wrote Texas-based osteopathic internist Thomas Nguyen, noting that Kennedy at one point in his post referred to the “VISP.”
“Yet another fearmongering & lie legitimizing move. RFK Jr creating an alternative reality where his BS has meaning. The world (mostly children) will suffer,” wrote Canadian health law professor Timothy Caulfield.
University of California, San Francisco law professor Dorit Reiss, meanwhile, tore apart Kennedy’s claims one by one in a lengthy thread.
“First, when he talks about the government’s resources v. the plaintiffs – does he think a plaintiff would be better off facing a pharmaceutical company’s resources?” she wrote. “Second, he ignores the real advantages claimants get in vaccine court compared to a regular court — including easier requirements in terms of proving things, more flexible rules of evidence, lawyer fees and costs covered and no contingency fee. Third, the VSD is a database of private medical information of private people; the limits on access to it are to protect medical privacy. If Secretary Kennedy intends to let lawyers without those limits in, the owners of the data would likely close access. Because they owe patients privacy.”
Additionally, she noted, “the vast majority of cases are compensated” and the only reason around half of them since the program’s inception have been rejected was due to the 5,000-case omnibus autism proceeding — “a thorough review, with several appeals examining decisions, and it found no link between vaccines and autism. Secretary Kennedy is unhappy about the result, but that’s not a problem with the program; it’s his bias.”