HHS launches a vaccine injury overhaul after years of failure
On Monday, October 5, the NIH cut the ribbon on a clinic in Bethesda, Maryland “dedicated to studying and caring for patients experiencing health problems following vaccination.” Today HHS laid out the rest of the plan.
CMS has proposed paying doctors for the time it takes to file a report to VAERS, the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Federal health-IT rules will now require medical records to capture vaccine adverse events. CDC signed a contract on September 28 to rebuild VAERS so it works on a phone.
“We must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries — not dismiss or gaslight them,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said.
This isn’t the first promise. Congress ordered HHS back in 1986 to make vaccines safer and report to it every two years under 42 U.S.C. § 300aa-27, and in 2018 HHS admitted in court it couldn’t find a single one of those reports.
Listening is long past overdue, and credit is given where it’s due. But shall we all read the plan again? Probably because almost all of it depends on one thing — the injured person, or their doctor, deciding on their own to report. People brainwashed into thinking their injuries are unrelated and the shots are perfectly safe, who were told to mock “anti-vaxxers” are told to report it as a potential vaccine injury. Sigh…
That’s the system that already failed before. In 2010 a federally funded project at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care built an automated system to catch vaccine reactions straight from medical records. Its final report to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.” Across 715,000 patients it flagged 35,570 possible reactions. Then the system went nowhere. The researchers wrote that “the CDC consultants responsible for receiving data were no longer responsive to our multiple requests.”
Then came the Covid shots, sold to the public as unequivocally “safe and effective.” If you’re told a product is safe, a heart flutter, a stroke or a sudden illness weeks later doesn’t look like a vaccine reaction. It looks like bad luck. It cannot be overstated that people who don’t connect an injury to a shot don’t report it, and their doctors often don’t either.
The FDA knew voluntary reporting wouldn’t be enough. When it approved Pfizer’s Comirnaty on August 23, 2021, its approval letter said spontaneous adverse event reporting “will not be sufficient to assess known serious risks of myocarditis and pericarditis and identify an unexpected serious risk of subclinical myocarditis.” It said the FDA’s own pharmacovigilance system wasn’t sufficient either. So it ordered Pfizer to run studies, including one following myocarditis patients for at least five years. That study’s completion date is December 31, 2026, and the final report is due May 31, 2027.
This is the same Pfizer that pleaded guilty to a felony in 2009 for selling a drug with “the intent to defraud or mislead” and paid a record $2.3 billion, and the FDA is now trusting it to grade its own heart-damage homework until 2027.
Put those dates side by side. The product was licensed in 2021, and the study of what it does to hearts over five years still isn’t finished. Hundreds of millions of doses went out in between, and now the public is being asked to fill in the gaps by reporting on itself. IoJ calls that what it is — the public is the study population in a GRAND EXPERIMENT.
The compensation side looks worse. Covid shots are “covered countermeasures” under the PREP Act, so injury claims don’t go to the regular vaccine court. They go to HHS’s own Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, with no judge, a one-year filing deadline and no appeal to a court.
As of September 1, 2026 —
- 14,206 Covid-19 claims filed
- Only 63 “compensated”
- 8,002 denied
- 6,084 still pending
If you were hurt by a COVID shot, the clock is already running. The CICP only takes claims filed within one year of the shot, under 42 U.S.C. § 247d-6e, and most people never hear about it in time.
That’s fewer than one payout for every 225 claims. The PREP Act shield that keeps the manufacturers out of court runs through the end of 2029. HHS’s announcement this week mentions none of it, and none of it mentions Covid. HHS also hasn’t released the clinic’s budget, enrollment rules, research protocol or ethics approval.
So is it lip service or real change? Paying doctors to report and putting reactions into the medical record are real changes, if they’re finalized and funded. A clinic that takes injured people seriously is real, if patients can actually get in. But a plan that still counts only the people who already know they were hurt, and still says nothing about the 14,206 Covid claims sitting in HHS’s own program, isn’t a real fix yet. The fix is obviously unjust unless it’s actually counting everyone who got the shot, tracking what happened to them, and paying the people it likely injured.
If you or a loved one were hurt and never reported it, or filed a CICP claim and are still waiting — tell IoJ in the comments, your story shapes what IoJ covers next.
more at interestofjustice.substack.com
Tom
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This is the laugh of the 21st century. Nothing is going to change and in fact it is going to get much worse as every vaccine is revised to fit the mRNA platform. The HHS is owned by big pharma so this is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
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