RFK Jr. Takes Aim at Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

Written by Brenda Baletti PhD on August 5, 2025. Posted in Current News

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday he plans to overhaul the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the federal program created to compensate people injured by vaccines

In an interview today, Kennedy said, “mainstream media is brain-dead when it comes to this issue. They will not criticize, they will not report vaccine injuries.”

Kennedy said that the federal program created to compensate people who are injured by vaccines has created an impossibly high bar for proof, which in turn has served “to abolish vaccine injury by fiat.”

He said the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has “devolved into this very, very heartless system that is designed to deny vaccine injury and to deny compensation to people who badly need it.”

Kennedy announced Monday, in a detailed post on X, that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) plans to overhaul the program.

“The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it. I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals,” he said.

Today, Kennedy said there is no incentive for manufacturers to address the issue because people can’t refuse to take the vaccines — they are mandated to attend school, and it is very difficult to obtain exemptions.

“And, of course, mainstream media is brain-dead when it comes to this issue. They will not criticize, they will not report vaccine injuries,” he said. “We can’t gaslight the parents. We can’t gaslight the children. We can’t marginalize and vilify the doctors and de-license the doctors who report injuries. We can’t punish and retract articles by the scientists who document those injuries. We have to start being honest again with the American public.”

Wayne Rohde, an expert in vaccine injury compensation, said, “The program has been in dire need of reform measures for many reasons, and many of the reforms will require congressional intervention.”

Rohde said key reforms that have a lot of support from people on all sides of the vaccine debate include increasing the statute of limitations on injuries. He said most vaccine experts agree on that point, but Big Pharma is very opposed to it.

Since 1986, VICP has paid over $5.4 billion to 12,000

The VICP was established by Congress under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which granted vaccine makers immunity from liability for injuries caused by their products.

The program, funded by a 75-cent surcharge on vaccines, covers injuries related to vaccines listed on the CDC childhood immunization schedule, with the exception of COVID-19 vaccines, which are covered under a separate program.

Since it was established, the VICP has paid over $5.4 billion to 12,000 people who filed claims, Kennedy said in his post. However, that number represents fewer than half of the claims that have been filed.

Countless other vaccine-injured people who would benefit from compensation have never filed — either because they don’t know about the program or because their injuries weren’t recognized within the two or three-year statute of limitations.

“The VICP routinely dismisses meritorious cases outright or drags them out for years,” Kennedy wrote.

He said the VICP denies petitioners access to data, pits them against the “bottomless pockets” of the U.S. government represented by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), intimidates and threatens expert witnesses for the injured, and makes punitive downward adjustments to their fees.

He wrote:

“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.”

Kennedy said he is working with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and HHS staff to revamp the system.

Liability shield protecting vaccine makers threatened

Kennedy’s announcement comes amid growing public and political skepticism over the legal immunity granted to vaccine manufacturers.

Last week, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) reintroduced legislation to end the liability shield for vaccine manufacturers and allow people injured by a vaccine to sue the drug’s manufacturer.

The End the Vaccine Carveout Act targets two federal laws that give legal immunity to vaccine makers — the 1986 act and the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act of 2005, known as the PREP Act, which protects manufacturers from liability for injuries or death caused by vaccines or other countermeasures implemented during a public health emergency.

Gozar’s bill would allow people injured by vaccines to sue the vaccine manufacturer. It would also expand the statute of limitations on vaccine injury and allow people injured by a vaccine to pursue both federal and civil compensation.

On July 15, during a U.S. Senate hearing on vaccine injuries, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a staunch vaccine supporter, suggested it was time to revisit the liability issue. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) agreed, telling witnesses that when it comes to the drug industry, “The government has decided that this particular industry gets a free pass.”

Also this month, Rolf Hazlehurst, whose son has autism, announced he will appeal a federal ruling against his allegations that DOJ lawyers representing HHS repeatedly defrauded the judicial system, beginning in the Vaccine Court.

Hazlehurst alleged the lawyers misrepresented and concealed evidence showing vaccines can cause autism, which resulted in his son being denied compensation for his injury.

The ruling dealt a blow to the thousands of families who filed petitions with the VICP alleging vaccines caused their children to develop autism.

In 2002, the VICP consolidated 5,000-plus claims into the Omnibus Autism Proceeding (OAP). It later selected six test cases, including that of Hazlehurst’s son, Yates, as the basis for determining the outcome of all of the remaining claims. The Vaccine Court ruled against all of the claimants, thereby dismissing thousands of claims.

However, in 2018, evidence emerged that the DOJ’s star expert medical witness, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, informed DOJ attorneys during the ongoing omnibus proceedings that he had modified his original opinion and determined that, in some cases, vaccines can and do cause autism.

In what Hazlehurst alleges was “a shocking cover-up,” instead of allowing Zimmerman to share his revised opinion, the DOJ attorneys relieved Zimmerman of his duties as a witness.

However, they continued to use excerpts from his unamended written opinion to make their case that vaccines did not cause autism — misrepresenting his position and committing “fraud on the court,” he alleged.

If Hazlehurst’s appeal is successful, it could clear the path for those families to access compensation.

Rulings in VICP cases ‘like a game of roulette’

Congress established the VICP after a crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Wyeth’s (now Pfizer’s) diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine caused seizures, serious brain injury or death among children.

Between 1980 and 1986, people injured by vaccines filed more than $3 billion worth of damage claims with U.S. civil courts against vaccine manufacturers, most of which were for the DTP vaccines.

After lawsuits revealed that Wyeth knew of the risks, juries began authorizing large payouts to some DTP-injured children. The payouts threatened to bankrupt the vaccine insurance industry and generated public concerns about vaccine safety.

Congress worked with manufacturers and injured families to create the VICP, on the premise that vaccines were important for public health but also caused injuries.

Congress intended to quickly and generously compensate the victims of vaccine injury, ensure the vaccine supply and improve vaccine safety, according to a report published with the act.

The VICP is administered by HHS with court-appointed “special masters” — typically lawyers who previously represented the U.S. government — who manage and decide the individual claims. In the court, attorneys may represent the injured, and the DOJ represents HHS.

Claims must be filed within three years of the first symptom, or two years of death. Vaccine-injured people say this timeline poses a major challenge, as many families don’t know the initial symptoms stem from a vaccine injury until it is too late to file.

VICP proceedings are more informal than a typical courtroom. There is no judge or jury, and the rules of evidence, civil procedure and discovery do not apply.

Compensation is based on the Vaccine Injury Table, which includes the list of vaccines, known associated injuries and the time periods in which they must occur.

If a claim is filed for an injury not listed on the table, the claimant must prove the vaccine caused the injury by providing a medical theory of the cause and a sequence of cause and effect, as well as showing a temporal relationship between the vaccine and the injury.

Rohde told The Defender that when the table was created, “We used to just administer a couple of vaccines at a time, like measles, mumps and rubella in the MMR vaccine. But nowadays they are administering seven, eight or nine antigens in two shots.”

The outcomes from those combined shots are more complex, Rohde said. Those injuries are often autoimmune disorders such as POTS or chronic Guillain-Barré syndrome, which typically take more time to diagnose. “They need to be recognized by the government rather than being dismissed automatically.”

It is solely up to the special master to determine whether the claimant submitted the proper “preponderance of evidence.”

Rohde said decisions by the special masters need to be consistent. Currently, some special masters recognize certain injuries and others don’t. “It’s like a game of roulette,” he said, “which special master is assigned to your case will determine the likelihood of whether or not you are compensated. It’s not based on science.”

See more here childrenshealthdefense.org

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