Today Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a sweeping initiative to fund research on vaccine injuries, including opening a new vaccine injury clinic at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
The initiative also proposes to reimburse physicians for reporting suspected vaccine-related injuries to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) through a new Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) policy and code. HHS also said they are modernizing VAERS and making it easier for physicians to report an injury.
“Most important of all we are listening to the voices of people who have suffered vaccine injury so we can learn from them,” said NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, in a video introducing the initiative posted to X.
In the same video, Kennedy calls vaccine injury an invisible disease, and said people who suffered vaccine injuries have been marginalized and vilified.
This is how we earn back trust in our public health institutions.
“We must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries—not dismiss or gaslight them,” Kennedy added in an HHS press release. “President Trump and I are building a health system that takes them seriously, follows the evidence, and uses what we learn to make vaccines safer. This is how we earn back trust in our public health institutions.”
CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, MD, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Erica Schwartz, MD, MPH, JD are also featured in the video. Throughout the video, the four health leaders say vaccine injury patients, and parents of children who have been harmed by vaccines, will finally be listened to.
Kennedy has a long history of falsely linking vaccines to chronic disease, autism, and even cancers. Although today’s announcement did not contain specifics, sources told The New York Times the research clinic may investigate aluminum-containing vaccines. Aluminum-containing vaccines have repeatedly been proven safe.
Existing program shows injury extremely rare
Meanwhile, new research published yesterday shows the existing Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which has helped families face vaccine injuries for 40 years, now faces a funding crisis. The program is a federal no-fault compensation system established under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.
According to a report from the Partnership to Fight Infectious Disease, vaccines have prevented 508 million illnesses and more than one million deaths during the VICP era, generating $2.7 trillion in societal savings, while vaccine-related injuries have been rare.
“Across more than 5.65 billion doses of covered vaccines distributed between 2006 and 2024,
the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program compensated roughly one person per million doses,” the report said. “That’s a figure that reflects both the extraordinary safety record of modern vaccines and the program’s ability to identify and compensate the rare cases where harm occurs.”
But VICP is facing a caseload challenge. More than 2,000 claims were filed in 2021 compared with 386 ten years earlier, and adjudicating a claim now takes two to three years. Reform must help speed up the process and increase the $250,000 cap on injury compensation.
“Strengthening the VICP through targeted reforms is not simply a necessary matter of fairness to those injured. It is an investment in the policy foundation that sustains vaccine availability, drives affordability, and provides the market stability that attracts innovators and makes the next generation of vaccines worth pursuing,” the report said.