Make Vaccine Injury Compensation Fair Again

We’ve known for years that the Covid-19 vaccines left many Americans seriously injured. Yet despite this common knowledge, the federal government’s surveillance to ensure vaccine safety has been substandard, to put it charitably. Worse, its performance in compensating those injured by the vaccine has been pathetic.

Now, Congress is finally paying attention to America’s vaccine woes.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., recently conducted a major hearing on general vaccine injuries, including childhood vaccines, taking sworn testimony on conditions from cardiovascular damage to neurodevelopmental disabilities. House investigators have also demonstrated the inadequacy of existing systems in tracking adverse events from the Covid-19 vaccines.

Such investigations have focused especially on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Under that system, doctors and patients are supposed to report Covid-19 vaccine injuries.

The sheer number of reported adverse events from the Covid-19 vaccine (over 1.8 million) dwarfs all previously reported vaccine injuries. But because it is a “passive” reporting system, largely based on patient self-reporting, VAERS is unable to show a causal relationship between a specific vaccine injection and a particular adverse reaction.

Weak Surveillance

The inherent weaknesses of patient self-diagnosis and reporting are obvious. But physicians have also been injured by the vaccines, and even their reporting leaves much to be desired.

So says Dr. Robert Sullivan, a board-certified anesthesiologist who was himself injured by the Covid-19 vaccine. Diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, he continues to suffer from heart damage and a severely reduced lung capacity.

In his testimony before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Dr. Sullivan told the senators that most doctors are seemingly unaware of VAERS. Not only that, but when it comes to vaccine education, he said, medical school curricula mostly focus on memorizing the vaccine schedules specifying the appropriate vaccines to prevent viral infections.

Sullivan emphasized that he is obviously enthusiastic about vaccines that work, but that one of the defects of VAERS is its failure to catch novel medical complications.

VAERS isn’t the only reporting system. In 2020, the CDC launched V-Safe to monitor Covid vaccine safety, attracting 10.1 million participants. By 2022, according to House congressional investigators, 782,913 persons reported an adverse vaccine event “requiring medical attention, emergency room intervention and/or hospitalization.”

But because of weaknesses in our reporting systems, it’s hard to know for sure how many Americans have been injured by the Covid-19 vaccines. Former FDA official Dr. Janet Woodcock told Congress that the vaccines caused certain neurological conditions, but, as House investigators noted, “it is difficult to neatly put neurological symptoms into any diagnostic category.”

Given that the Covid-19 vaccine campaign was the biggest in American history, it makes no sense for its symptoms not to have a diagnostic category.

That’s a view shared by React 19, a patient advocacy organization that represents over 36,000 vaccine injured Americans, which is now pushing Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to establish a diagnostic code for the various adverse reactions from the Covid-19 vaccines.

Thankfully, the Trump administration has already determined to upgrade the quality of vaccine safety monitoring. Dr. Marty Makary, the new FDA commissioner, says that the agency will go well beyond the defective reporting of the VAERS program and start to rely on clinical data on vaccine injuries from electronic health records provided through health information exchanges.

Program Failure

But even worse than the government’s Covid-19 vaccine safety monitoring system has been the government’s vaccine injury compensation program — the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), a program administered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

While the CICP is supposed to compensate victims for serious injury or death from vaccines deployed as “countermeasures” in a national medical emergency, the law provides vaccine manufacturers extremely broad immunity. And according to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, the Covid-19 pandemic showed that the “Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program failed to handle a mass vaccination program.”

The subcommittee came with damning evidence. As of August 2024, 13,520 claims had been filed with the CICP, of which a full 10,082 (roughly 75 percent) were “pending or in review.” Only 3,438 decisions had been reached, of which 3,373 claims (roughly 98 percent) were denied.

Of the thousands of injury claims submitted, only 65 were deemed eligible for adjudication, and only 18 actually ended with compensation.

Worse, the victims’ compensation was paltry, with the average award totaling just $24,514. That’s minuscule compared to the amount issued under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which adjudicates claims for standard childhood vaccines. The average compensation under that program equaled “approximately” $468,000 over the past 35 years, and claimants were entitled to federal judicial appeal.

The CICP’s failure is attributable to various factors including, most importantly, the sheer size of the Covid-19 caseload, which dwarfed the staff assigned to the program. As the subcommittee highlighted, Congress failed to appropriate sufficient funding for the program, and only four staff were initially assigned to handle the thousands of claims. Only later was the total number expanded to 35, who were still able to adjudicate an average of just 90 claims a month.

As the House subcommittee concluded: “Regardless of any claims that Covid-19 vaccines are particularly dangerous, it appears that the federal government mandated them without an adequate system in place to adjudicate the inevitable injuries they cause. This may have significant effects on the trust of the public and damage confidence in vaccines.”

Bipartisan Cooperation?

Fixing this issue requires Congress to work with the White House to amend current law, which provides overly broad limitations on manufacturers’ liability. Congress must strike a prudent balance between providing fair and just financial compensation for the vaccine-injured while protecting public health and stimulating medical innovation.

As the House select subcommittee observed: “Since vaccines are an important tool to protect public health, it is imperative to preserve the public’s trust in vaccination, and therefore compensating for these rare but inevitable harms is of vital importance. Conversely, limiting the liability of manufacturers also promotes the expeditious development of new and innovative vaccine technology which saves lives.”

There is potential for bipartisan cooperation on this pressing issue. For example, Dr. Robert Redfield, former CDC director, says that victims of Covid vaccine injuries should be able to sue the vaccine manufacturers, and that the broad immunity provided under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act of 2005 needs to be replaced with a more rational regime to compensate the vaccine-injured.

Likewise, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, expressed his deep reservations over providing any manufacturer the equivalent of “blanket” immunity, noting that the 1986 Vaccine Injury Compensation Program may also need to be reevaluated.

Striking the right balance will require real statesmanship and hard legislative work. But justice requires that Congress develop a more fair and rational system for compensating the many injured victims of vaccines that Washington didn’t just approve or promote, but in fact briefly mandated.

There is no other honorable course for America’s lawmakers.

Robert E. Moffit, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Abigail Gilreath, a member of the Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program, contributed research for this article.