The health secretary said there are issues with the program, which was created as part of a law that gives vaccine manufacturers immunity.
Federal officials are working on revamping the program that provides compensation for people who suffer injuries from vaccines, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on June 30.
“We just brought a guy in this week who is going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program,” Kennedy said during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was established as part of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. That law also granted vaccine manufacturers immunity from lawsuits. Under the program, injury claims are lodged with judges, who decide whether to grant payouts after hearing from petitioners and the government.
Department of Justice attorneys, representing the Department of Health and Human Services—the department Kennedy heads—often present evidence opposing the claims.
The program has since 2006 awarded money, drawn from surcharges on vaccines to more than 13,000 people.
Claims of injury from COVID-19 vaccines are currently filed with the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, a separate program established by a 2005 law. The Department of Health solely administers that program by receiving petitions, analyzing them, and making determinations, creating what researchers said in 2022 was a potential conflict of interest.
The department has rejected claims from some people whose doctors diagnosed them with vaccine injuries, The Epoch Times reported in 2023. Just 39 COVID-19 vaccine claims have been compensated as of June 1, with all but four receiving less than $9,000.
Multiple lawmakers and lawyers have advocated moving COVID-19 vaccines to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program so that people with injuries have a better chance of receiving compensation and, if they’re paid, can receive more money.
“We’re looking at ways to enlarge that program so that COVID-vaccine-injured people can be compensated,” Kennedy told Carlson.
Kennedy also said officials are looking at methods to enlarge the statute of limitations, which is currently only three years.
“A lot of people don’t discover their injuries until after that,” he said.
“And there’s no discovery in that program, there’s no rules of evidence. The program has devolved into lawyers from the justice—you’re not suing the vaccine company, you’re petitioning my agency, and it’s represented traditionally by the Department of Justice—and the lawyers in the Department of Justice, the leaders of it were corrupt, and … they saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice. And we’re going to change all that.”
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
