Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and director of the Vaccine Schooling Heart at Youngsters’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for years has sparred with Kennedy over vaccines. Offit fears that Kennedy will use flawed research to justify including autism and different widespread medical issues to the damage desk, regardless of how a lot they battle with sturdy scientific analysis.
“You are able to do that, and you’ll bankrupt this system,” he stated. “These are methods to finish vaccine manufacturing on this nation.”
If the belief fund had been to expire of cash, Congress must act, stated Dorit Reiss, a regulation professor at College of California Regulation San Francisco who has studied the Vaccine Damage Compensation Program. Congress may enhance the excise tax on vaccines, she stated, or go a regulation limiting what’s on the damage desk. Or Congress may abolish this system, and the vaccine makers would discover themselves again within the scenario they confronted within the Nineteen Eighties.
“That’s not unrealistic,” Reiss stated.
Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, final yr proposed the Finish the Vaccine Carveout Act, which might have allowed individuals to bypass the no-fault system and head straight to civil courtroom. His press launch for the invoice—written in September, earlier than Kennedy’s ascension to HHS secretary—quoted Kennedy saying, “If we would like protected and efficient vaccines, we have to finish the legal responsibility defend.”
The laws by no means got here up for a vote. A spokesperson for the congressman stated he expects to introduce it once more “within the very close to future.”
Renée Gentry, director of the George Washington College Regulation Faculty’s Vaccine Damage Litigation Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely Congress will blow up the no-fault program. However Gentry, who represents individuals submitting claims for accidents, stated it’s arduous to foretell what Congress, confronted with a doomsday situation, would do.
“Usually Democrats are mates of plaintiffs’ attorneys,” she stated. “However speaking about vaccines on the Hill is like strolling on a razor blade that’s on fireplace.”
