In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio. A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
He has now hijacked the CDC website -- and the CDC itself.
Amanda Chu at Politico:Signs of a new legal opportunity emerged earlier this month when Kennedy removed four childhood vaccines from the routine schedule – a move lawyers say could increase litigation against drugmakers. While patients can still receive the vaccines, they are no longer routinely recommended, giving the secretary a legal pathway to exclude them from the table of vaccines covered in the government-run vaccine-injury compensation program without needing congressional approval. That, in turn, would force vaccine-injured patients to sue drugmakers directly for compensation.
“If they remove various vaccines from the vaccine injury table, that would permit consumers to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable in instances where the company failed to warn that the vaccine causes a harm or where the company could have made the vaccine safer but didn’t,” said Aaron Siri, a trial lawyer who has worked with Kennedy.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was created by Congress in 1986 after a series of lawsuits against vaccine makers prompted many of them to pull out of the market. The no-fault program provided an immunity shield to vaccine makers while also lowering the burden of proof for people seeking compensation through the program compared to what they’d face in court.
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The golden age of tort suits, when attorneys had asbestos and tobacco companies to go after, may be over. Tort cases have remained low over the past decade, representing only 6 percent of incoming state trial court civil caseloads in 2024, compared to 7 percent in 2014, according to the Center for Justice and Democracy’s comparison of data from the National Center for State Courts. “The arc of American civil litigation bends not toward expansion but toward contraction,” said Nora Freeman Engstrom, an expert on tort law at Stanford University.
When it comes to vaccines, personal injury lawyers who specialize in using the existing compensation system say most plaintiffs alleging they were hurt by a vaccine are likely to do worse in court. Courts will require a higher burden of proof than the compensation program and damages may be too small for a trial lawyer to be interested in pursuing a case, they said.
“The focus on vaccine injury has been dulled and blurred and politicized,” said Robert Krakow, a vaccine injury lawyer who has worked with Kennedy on past litigation, including suits against Merck over the Gardasil vaccine.
