‘60 Minutes’ Exposes Vaccine Court Failures
However, experts accuse CBS of pushing the narrative that vaccine injuries are ‘rare’ and compensation is common.
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.
On Sunday night, CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired a segment about the Vaccine Court, shining light on vaccine injuries and exposing flaws in the federal program for compensating victims. Experts told The Defender they were pleased to see the issue get mainstream coverage, but accused CBS News of pushing the narrative that vaccine injuries are ‘rare’ and compensation is common.
CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday night aired a segment on the Vaccine Court, a federal system created nearly 40 years ago to compensate people injured by vaccines. The program’s guests and host agreed that the system, designed to compensate people “quickly, easily, and with certainty and generosity,” is failing in that mission under a crushing backlog of thousands of cases.
The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which administers the Vaccine Court, has appealed to Congress for more resources, but Congress has failed to act, “60 Minutes” host L. Jon Wertheim said.
CBS News said its reporting “suggests that this inaction is in part because vaccination has become such a loaded, heavily politicized issue that legislators are reluctant to wade in.”
Experts gave the national legacy news program credit for taking on the vaccine injury issue and calling out the VICP’s flaws. But they also criticized the segment for minimizing the scope and seriousness of vaccine injuries and the government’s failure to compensate the injured.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland told The Defender she was pleased that “60 Minutes” aired the segment because most parents don’t even know they can’t sue a vaccine maker if their child is injured by a vaccine — and they don’t know that they have to file a claim through the VICP and take their case to the Vaccine Court. “People are told only that ‘vaccines are safe and effective’ and ‘vaccines save lives,’” Holland said.
She added:
“While I am delighted that mainstream media is starting to cover the vast reality of vaccine injury, this segment left people with false conclusions — that vaccines are great and have saved 154 million lives, that the compensation program is easy and fair and that the Vaccine Court previously ‘proved’ that vaccines don’t cause autism. None of these claims is correct.”
Wayne Rohde, author of two books on the Vaccine Court, told The Defender he was glad CBS covered the issue, but said the segment was designed to push a “disingenuous” message.
“They did a good job editing the program to get their so-called message across,” he said. “That message is that vaccine injuries are rare and that there is a way to get compensation when someone is injured.”
In reality, he said, getting compensation in the program for most people is “like climbing Mt. Everest without oxygen or ropes.”
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Vaccine injury ‘more prevalent than we are told’
The “60 Minutes” segment featured two people, both injured by vaccines, who had petitioned the VICP for compensation. One was a boy who suffered hundreds of seizures followed by loss of speech, motor skills and other injuries after getting the DTaP vaccine at age 6 months.
The other was a man diagnosed with “a rare autoimmune disease” caused by the tetanus vaccine. He waited six years for a ruling, and is still waiting to be awarded damages.
The segment repeatedly emphasized that such cases are rare, likening their frequency, in a perverse analogy, to “lottery odds.”
“Vaccine injury is much more prevalent than we are told,” Rohde said.
Congress established the VICP after a crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Wyeth’s (now Pfizer’s) diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine caused seizures, serious brain injury or death among children.
After lawsuits revealed that Wyeth knew of the risks, juries began authorizing large payouts to some children injured by the vaccine. The payouts threatened to bankrupt the vaccine insurance industry and generated public concerns about vaccine safety.
In response, Congress created the VICP to compensate the victims of vaccine injury, ensure the vaccine supply and improve vaccine safety.
The VICP is administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with court-appointed “special masters” — typically lawyers who previously represented the U.S. government — deciding individual claims.
VICP proceedings have no judge or jury, and typical rules of evidence, civil procedure and discovery don’t apply. Compensation is based on the Vaccine Injury Table, which includes the list of vaccines, known associated injuries and the time periods in which they must occur in order to qualify for compensation.
For injuries not listed on the table, a person must prove the vaccine caused their injury by providing a medical theory of the cause, timing and a sequence of cause and effect.
Nearly impossible to opt out of the program
Wertheim interviewed Renee Gentry, a VICP lawyer, who said the program doesn’t stop people from suing manufacturers. People must first petition the program, but if they don’t like the outcome, they can sue the manufacturer, she said.
Rohde said that’s no longer true. When the Vaccine Court was first established, people who didn’t agree with their judgment could sue the manufacturer in state or federal court.
However, when one of those cases, Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, went to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court ruled in favor of Wyeth. The decision effectively closed the door on people’s ability to sue, unless the vaccine maker commits fraud or a vaccine has a defective design.
Since then, cases challenging manufacturers on those grounds haven’t succeeded, Rohde said. He said the costs of bringing such cases are prohibitive — families would have to pay lawyers and experts in cases that can stretch out for 10 years or more, which he said could cost millions.
“It’s disingenuous to tell us that we can go to court like that,” said Rohde, who is also the father of a son who regressed into autism following vaccination.
Children aren’t being compensated
The “60 Minutes” segment featured a young vaccine-injured boy who will receive compensation for life — a rare outcome for people who apply to the program, experts said.
The VICP was set up to provide compensation to families of children injured by vaccines. However today, Rohde said, children are rarely compensated for their injuries. Over the last decade, adults comprised 95% of the compensated cases.
Rohde said this is partly because children typically receive multiple vaccines at once, which means it’s difficult to identify which vaccine caused their injury. Adults typically get one vaccine at a time, so the cause and effect is easier to show.
The other issue, he said, is that starting in the 1990s, U.S. Health Secretary Donna Shalala began restricting the table injuries — she removed residual seizure disorder from the table and restricted the definition of encephalopathy in children.
Rohde said at that time, there were emerging clues suggesting a link between vaccines and autism.
In the mid-2000s, special masters in the omnibus autism proceedings (OAP) ruled against families alleging that the MMR vaccine or vaccines containing thimerosal caused their children’s autism.
The decisions in a few “test cases” resulted in over 5,000 families being denied compensation for their claims, and discouraged future similar claims from being filed.
To dispute vaccines and autism, “60 Minutes” interviewed two of the special masters who decided the autism cases.
“I ultimately concluded there simply was not the evidence I hoped there would be,” said Special Master Denise Vowell. CBS said that all three special masters who heard the cases, “concluded there was no link between vaccines and autism on appeal.”
CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker said CBS “completely misrepresents the vaccine autism issue.” The Vaccine Court never ruled that there was no link between vaccines and autism, it ruled only on the MMR vaccine and thimerosal-containing vaccines.
“This leaves a gaping hole regarding the 16 other vaccines and myriad other vaccine components that are known to cause harm,” Hooker said. “In fact, in 2011, the Institute of Medicine could not rule out a relationship between the DTaP vaccine and autism, because there simply was not enough evidence on a causal connection.”
Hooker and Rohde both took issue with “60 Minutes’” representation of the special masters as compassionate. During the hearings, Hooker said, “the special masters interviewed, eviscerated and marginalized expert witnesses for the petitioners within the OAP to the point that it became impossible to find an expert witness to give an opinion on causation.”
“These bureaucrats were more interested in protecting their vaccine court system than giving justice to the 5,500 petitioners in the OAP, simply because awarding claims to these vaccine-damaged children would have bankrupted the vaccine injury fund many times over,” he added.
Kennedy moves to reform vaccine injury table
In July, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he is working on reforms to the VICP that would make it easier for some people injured by vaccines to get compensation.
Long-time vaccine injury lawyer and current HHS adviser Drew Downing said the department is considering changes to the VICP to make it easier for some people injured by vaccines to access compensation.
During a panel discussion late last month hosted by the MAHA institute, Downing suggested that expanding the definition of two serious brain conditions — encephalitis and encephalopathy — may make it easier for children who regress into autism following vaccination to be compensated for their injuries.
Expanding the definition could mean recognizing the conditions as linked to more vaccines, or expanding the compensable time period in which they occur.
In a written interview with “60 Minutes,” Kennedy confirmed that he is hoping to expand the table.
He said the court “has become a disaster for the families of injured children. Its effective function is delayed,” and it is plagued by “denial and systematic cruelty.”
“Secretary Kennedy is absolutely right to focus on the gross inadequacies of the program, including its pro-government bias, lack of procedural safeguards and crushing delays,” Holland said. “Reform in the vaccine compensation program is woefully overdue.”
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