Vaccine Liability Is on the Table

Vaccine Liability Is on the Table
by James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone Institute

The national conversation on vaccine injury and accountability has returned—this time from within the halls of power. On July 28, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a blistering rebuke of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), calling it a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption. His statement follows decades of criticism from researchers, patient advocates, and injured families who have watched the program drift further from its original mission: to compensate those injured by vaccines swiftly and fairly, in exchange for protecting manufacturers from lawsuits.

But now, the call is coming from inside the building—and so are the corroborating accounts. I speak from personal experience.

A System Designed to Protect Industry, Not People

Established in 1986 under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the VICP was sold to the public as a compromise. Vaccine makers would be shielded from product liability lawsuits, but a special court would hear injury claims and disburse funds from a trust financed by a 75-cent surcharge on every dose. The result was a legal anomaly: a taxpayer-funded compensation system adjudicated by government attorneys and so-called Special Masters, immune from civil discovery, unbound by the rules of evidence, and utterly inaccessible to traditional tort remedies.

It is, in every material sense, a system rigged against the injured.

More than 12,000 petitioners have received compensation totaling over $5.4 billion, but this figure hides more than it reveals. The average payout may hover around $450,000, but cases can drag on for years. Worse, over half of all claims are denied—often without genuine examination of mechanistic plausibility or patient history.

And contrary to public assumption, most of these awards are not for injured children, but for adults—many of them harmed by influenza vaccines and other products routinely administered to working-age populations. This pattern directly undercuts the common refrain that VICP is merely a safeguard for pediatric vaccination. It is not. It is a backdoor bailout system for manufacturers—deliberately kept quiet, procedurally opaque, and inaccessible to public scrutiny.

My Departure: Bribery, Aluminum, and the End of Trust

I left my role in the VICP process after a Special Master attempted to bribe me.

During sworn expert work on behalf of a petitioner, I had prepared testimony linking aluminum adjuvants to autoimmune conditions via well-established immunological pathways, including molecular mimicry, the use of aluminum hydroxide to induce autoimmunity reliability and reproducibility in animals, and chronic inflammatory cascades. The science is robust—rooted in animal models, systems biology, and translational studies.

Instead of rebutting the data, the Special Master took another path: off the record and improper. The plaintiff was informed that the VICP had already determined that aluminum was not a problem (a violation of the rule of not citing precedent), and they were told —explicitly—that unless I softened or removed my statements on aluminum’s causal role in the development of post-vaccination autoimmune disease, the Special Master was not likely to want to compensate me for further testimony. It was implied that my future participation in the program and reputation within the Court system would be accommodated.

My response was to put the attempted bribe on the record in my next expert statement, withdraw all of my invoices in protest, and to depart the program.

That recording is in the possession of the plaintiff, multiple attorneys, and me. Its contents will, when considered by the AG office, obliterate any illusion that the VICP operates under the rules of ethics or law. The incident does not stand alone. It is the tip of a very large iceberg—one built on procedural fraud, scientific suppression, and judicial strong-arming.

Secretary Kennedy: Course Correction from within

RFK, Jr. made clear that reform will not be cosmetic. He criticized the VICP for prioritizing the solvency of the HHS Trust Fund over the duty to compensate victims, and called out the agency for denying plaintiffs access to the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD)—the most robust adverse event surveillance system in existence.

In his words, There is no discovery, and the rules of evidence do not apply…Special Masters dismiss over half of the cases…the government lawyers do not allow children’s attorneys access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink.

Whether one agrees with Kennedy politically is irrelevant. The rot he describes is not ideological. It is institutional. The structural incentives are clear: HHS defends HHS. DOJ attorneys defend HHS. Special Masters are selected and paid under HHS. The CDC owns the VSD but hides its data from plaintiffs. The DOJ has an incentive to dismiss claims to protect the trust fund balance. This is not a court—it is a closed circuit.

Reader Reactions: The Three Americas

In response to the Seeking Alpha article covering RFK, Jr.’s announcement, readers offered unfiltered insight into public sentiment. Three distinct worldviews emerged.

First were the Realists, who support vaccines generally but are appalled by the injustice baked into the VICP. As one commenter put it, Sunshine is a good disinfectant. Another added, If it is a societal good to mandate immunizations and shield companies from liability, then we should be willing to compensate those with adverse reactions.

Second came the Defenders of the Shield, who insisted that removing liability would collapse vaccine innovation. One commenter claimed, There would be no vaccines in the US once that happened, ignoring the fact that other nations without liability shields still fund, develop, and manufacture vaccines. Others leaned on the misleading statistic that adverse effects are rare—failing to mention that injuries are underreported, dismissed without evidence review, and often not tracked in any meaningful long-term way.

Third came the Disillusioned, who questioned the ethics of an industry so entwined with the state that corruption is normalized. Some accused RFK, Jr. of fronting for trial lawyers. Others saw the pandemic response itself as evidence that vaccine policy is less about science and more about political obedience.

Whether extreme or reasoned, these perspectives highlight a growing truth: the VICP no longer commands public trust.

Legal Immunity Is the Enemy of Innovation

The claim that loss of immunity will halt vaccine development is not only false—it is dangerously backward. In fact:

Loss of immunity will force vaccine makers to innovate.

Without accountability, companies have no incentive to improve adjuvants, reduce contamination, study long-term risks, or design surveillance systems that detect harm in real-time. The current regime has enabled stagnation. Nearly all pediatric vaccines on the schedule are based on decades-old platforms. The most rapid innovation—mRNA—was released under EUA without liability and now shows signals of myocarditis, menstrual irregularities, and other systemic effects that the courts may never adjudicate.

In no other industry is this tolerated. Heart valve makers, prosthetics manufacturers, and psychiatric drug developers all face liability. They still operate. They still innovate. They improve because they must.

Shielding vaccines from legal challenge has not increased safety—it has buried it.

Reform or Repeal: What Comes Next?

RFK, Jr.’s proposals may be only the beginning. True reform requires:

• Open public access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink
• A neutral body—independent from HHS—to adjudicate claims
• The restoration of civil discovery and standard evidentiary procedure
• Time limits on case resolution
• Repeal of liability protections for any vaccine added under emergency use or without full pre-licensure safety trials

The American public has paid the price for blind trust in captured systems. The VICP is not broken because of incompetence—it was designed to serve institutional solvency over justice. That design must be reversed.

Conclusion: The Shield Is Cracking

For decades, vaccine liability has been off-limits, protected by layers of legal abstraction and media silence. Now, with a reformer at the helm of HHS and credible insider testimony—mine included—exposing bribery within the program itself, the silence is breaking.

The VICP cannot be patched. It must be reimagined—or replaced entirely. The goal is not to dismantle public health. It is to restore it through accountability, transparency, and respect for those who paid the price in silence.

That silence ends now. Vaccine liability is back on the table.

---

Full Kennedy Post (on X):

“The 1986 Vaccine Act gave vaccine makers immunity against lawsuits by children who suffer vaccine injuries. The statute, and numerous subsequent court decisions, recognized that vaccines, like all medicines, are, in the words of the American Academy of Pediatrics case, “unavoidably unsafe,” and that a percentage of vaccinated children will suffer injuries or death. Congress, therefore, simultaneously created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which obliged HHS to compensate injured children. In the words of then Labor and Public Welfare Committee Chairman Senator Edward Kennedy, “when…children are the victims of an appropriate and rational national policy, a compassionate [g]overnment will assist them in their hour of need.” 

Under the VICP, vaccine victims can petition for compensation to the so-called “Vaccine Court,” which pays out awards from a trust fund endowed by a 75-cent surcharge on every vaccine. Congress intended that injured children be compensated “quickly and fairly” for injuries, “either presumed or proven to be causally connected to vaccines,” with doubts about causation resolved in favor of the victim. 

To date, the Vaccine Court has paid out $5.4 billion to 12,000 petitioners. But the VICP no longer functions to achieve its Congressional intent. Instead, the VICP has devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption as government lawyers and the Special Masters who serve as Vaccine Court judges prioritize the solvency of the HHS Trust Fund, over their duty to compensate victims. 

The structure itself hobbles claimants. The defendant is HHS, not the vaccine makers; and claimants are therefore facing the monumental power and bottomless pockets of the US government represented by the Department of Justice. Furthermore, most of the Special Masters come from government, legal, or political posts, and typically display an extreme bias that favors the government side. There is no discovery, and the rules of evidence do not apply. The government lawyers do not allow children’s attorneys access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a taxpayer-funded CDC surveillance system that houses the best data on vaccine injuries. Attorney compensation is in the hands of notoriously biased Special Masters and often hostile government attorneys, who can leverage this power to turn petitioner attorneys against their clients’ interests. 

The VICP routinely dismisses meritorious cases outright or drags them out for years. Instead of “quickly and fairly” awarding compensation, Special Masters dismiss over half of the cases. Most of those that proceed typically take 5+ years to resolve, with many languishing for more than 10 years as parents struggle to care for children suffering with often extreme disabilities. Petitioners’ attorneys complain that the Special Masters make punitive downward adjustments to attorneys’ fees and medical expert fees to punish effective advocacy. Expert witnesses for injured children complain that they suffer intimidation and even threats that they will lose professional status or NIH funding if they testify for injured children. The government pays its own medical expert witnesses promptly while simultaneously slow-walking payments for petitioners’ experts—sometimes for years. 

The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it. I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals. 

I am grateful to be working with @AGPamBondi and HHS staff to fix the VISP.

Together, we will steer the Vaccine Court back to its original Congressional intent.”

Republished from the author’s Substack

Vaccine Liability Is on the Table
by James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society