Kennedy announces plan to reform Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

By Sarah Owermohle, CNN

(CNN) — US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday that he is working with the Justice Department to overhaul a national program that compensates people injured by vaccination.

Kennedy, a longtime critic of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, wrote on X that he would “fix” the VICP process, which he says “has devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption.”

Congress established the VICP in the 1980s as a route for people who have rare but serious side effects from vaccinations to receive compensation from pharmaceutical companies, without those manufacturers being found negligent.

Kennedy has long argued that the program has ignored its mandate to quickly and fairly cover vaccine injury claims. The anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which he chaired until last year, has filed multiple lawsuits against the government demanding records from VICP and federal databases of those claims.

Kennedy said in his post Monday that the officials overseeing VICP, known as special masters, prioritize the finances of the federal health department’s trust fund over those claims.

Those special masters are appointed by the Court of Federal Claims and can be removed only by that court, “exactly to give them independence and keep them out of politics,” Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, told CNN.

This action “serves a broader anti-vaccine agenda,” Reiss said.

This new effort could open the door for HHS to bolster debunked theories that vaccines cause autism. It could also revive legal arguments around the safety of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, made by Merck.

Kennedy, as a consultant for Wisner Baum prior to becoming health secretary, referred “many hundreds” of cases to the law firm, including those claiming injury from Gardasil shots. Per the consulting agreement, Kennedy was entitled to 10% of any compensation payout, according to his financial disclosures. He pledged in written responses to senators to divest entirely from those lawsuits — which, he said, meant he would not need to recuse himself from decision making around Gardasil.

In those responses, Kennedy said he divested any litigation interests to his “non-dependent, adult son.” He did not name the son, but one of his four sons, Conor Kennedy, works for Wisner Baum.

Kennedy has also argued that Covid-19 vaccine injury claims should be included in VICP; those claims, which numbered more than 13,000 by the end of 2024, are covered in a separate but similar program to cover injuries from countermeasures. Special masters found 3% of those claims eligible for compensation, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The Children’s Health Defense separately filed a lawsuit against HHS last week, arguing that it failed to establish a task force for safer childhood vaccines mandated in the 1980s. The suit also revives one of Kennedy’s longtime claims, although the government did convene that task force and issue a report in 1998.

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