WHAT IS VICP? Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to the social media platform X on Monday — as well as conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s show — to promote his plan to “fix” the system that HHS uses to compensate people injured by vaccines.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has long been a target of Kennedy’s ire, and now, he plans major changes to it.
I spoke with POLITICO’s Lauren Gardner, who covers the program closely, about how it operates and what we know so far about Kennedy’s plans.
Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Why was the VICP created and how does it work?
Congress created the VICP in 1986 after a series of lawsuits against vaccine makers prompted many of them to pull out of the market. Lawmakers worked with companies, public health advocates and parents who said their children were vaccine-injured to establish a no-fault alternative to the traditional tort system.
Under the program, drugmakers’ liability is limited, and compensation from an industry-funded tax is available with a lower burden of proof. The intention was to reduce the uncertainty for everyone involved and ensure the stability of the domestic supply of childhood vaccines.
To be considered for compensation, a petitioner must file a claim generally within three years of the injury’s onset. If the person’s injury is listed on a table of injuries presumed to be caused by a given vaccine during a certain timeframe, it’s typically easier for them to win compensation; otherwise, they must show their injury was “more likely than not” caused by the immunization.
Kennedy has repeatedly critiqued the program. What does he say is the issue?
Some of the secretary’s problems with the program are shared by public health experts and, unsurprisingly, vaccine injury lawyers who say the process has become more adversarial in recent years and can take many years to resolve. On the latter point, legal experts point to the law’s limit on the number of “special masters” — essentially judges who consider these cases — at the vaccine court as something Kennedy can’t address without Congress.
However, Kennedy also made several false or misleading claims Monday, including stating that “the act has changed” so that the vaccine court is the “exclusive remedy” for families who might prefer to sue drugmakers in state court. They can do that — as he should know, given his work as an injury lawyer outside of the program — but they have to exhaust their claim at the VICP first.
What details do we have about how Kennedy wants to “fix” VICP?
Kennedy didn’t say anything new about his plans in Monday’s interview. So far, we know he wants to increase the statute of limitations and to somehow compensate people injured by Covid-19 vaccines via the VICP; they currently fall under a separate program that’s been widely panned as ineffective.
Kennedy specifically referenced a 1995 change to the vaccine injury table’s definition of encephalopathy, a broad term for brain dysfunction, that he said “made it so there’s no way you can prove” it was caused by a vaccine. He called the program a “heartless system that is designed to deny vaccine injury and to deny compensation to people who badly need it, and we are about to fix all that.”
He also namechecked Attorney General Pam Bondi as someone who’s working with him on this, so since the Justice Department works with HHS to administer the VICP, we could see changes come from that side of Washington, too.
