The vital vaccine shield America cannot afford to lose

Since 1989, the U.S. government has run a program that has distributed more than $5.5 billion to individuals who have suffered adverse consequences from vaccines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to destroy it.

The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Congress designed this “no-fault” federal system to do two crucial things: ensure that individuals who experience exceedingly rare, severe reactions to vaccines are compensated quickly and fairly without having to slog through the federal district courts, and protect the stability of the nation’s vaccine supply.

It gives families an avenue for relief without requiring them to prove negligence by a manufacturer. Simultaneously, it protects pharmaceutical companies from catastrophic, unpredictable liability that could force them to stop making life-saving shots altogether.

The impetus was a wave of lawsuits that threatened to drive vaccine manufacturers out of business entirely. Diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine shortages surged, prices skyrocketed, and the nation faced the terrifying prospect of losing access to basic immunizations against deadly diseases. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program ended those threats and allowed vaccine manufactures to continue their research and production of vaccines that have saved millions of lives since.

The program works in part by presuming causation for a specific list of injuries for each listed vaccine, relieving families from proving both negligence and causation. That list of presumed injuries has been established through a committee of experts conducting extensive scientific reviews to arrive at an agreed upon set of causation.

But Kennedy, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has referred to the fund not as a safety net but as a corporate shield that protects “Big Pharma” from accountability. By stripping vaccine manufacturers of their liability protections , he wants to throw vaccine injury claims back into traditional civil courts and to open the issues of negligence and causation to conventional civil litigation.

The secretary is also pursuing an additional tool, one that will eventually destroy the program while enshrining one of his central conspiracy theories in the law: He wants autism to be listed as one of the presumed causations of vaccines . Listing autism as an injury that is “presumed” to have been caused by vaccines seems likely to flood the system with claims that will ultimately drain the funds and collapse the whole enterprise.

For years, Kennedy has been promoting thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, repeatedly claiming a link between childhood immunizations and autism — a narrative rejected by every major global scientific body. But now, as the head of Health and Human Services, changes to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program could finally give him the opportunity to give legal weight to his autism conspiracy theory.

Dismantling or undermining the compensation program today would likely trigger the same crisis the nation faced in 1989 but on a much larger scale. If manufacturers are forced to price the risk of endless, unpredictable litigation into every vial, or the consequences of listing autism as a presumed “caused” injury, vaccine prices will soar. Many companies will simply stop producing them altogether.

The result will not be safer vaccines; it will be severe shortages, preventable disease outbreaks, and a devastating blow to herd immunity that puts our most vulnerable citizens — newborns, the elderly and the immunocompromised — at grave risk.

Furthermore, dismantling the fund fundamentally harms the very families Kennedy claims to champion. Far from a hollow corporate shield, the fund has quietly and officially delivered billions of dollars in total financial compensation to more than 12,500 injured Americans since its inception.

Stripping this streamlined safety net away doesn’t protect the public; it forces families into an understaffed civil tort system where decades of grueling legal battles, astronomical attorney fees, and the nearly impossible burden of proving a manufacturer’s specific fault in a traditional court of law awaits them. The current system is not perfect — it suffers from administrative backlogs that need fixing — but replacing it with a broken litigation lottery is a disservice to victims.

Richard Sauber is a lawyer in private practice in Washington. He served as special counsel to former President Biden.