RFK Jr. and Pam Bondi Target Corruption in Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Monday that he will be working alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi to fix the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). In a statement posted to X, Kennedy referenced the American Academy of Pediatrics and its recognition that vaccines, like all medicines, are “unavoidably unsafe.” For this reason, Kennedy said the 1986 Act was passed to provide immunity from lawsuits for vaccine injuries.

Kennedy said the VICP is not serving its intended purpose to “quickly and fairly” compensate injured children, including presumed cases of vaccine injury that contain some level of doubt. 

“To date, the Vaccine Court has paid out $5.4 billion to 12,000 petitioners,” Secretary Kennedy wrote. “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 VICP is a program that protects the vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits. The federal government takes on the liability through this program, and HHS is the defendant in the court procedure when a petition is filed on behalf of a vaccine-injured individual. This applies to all childhood vaccinations, but does not apply to the COVID-19 vaccine. COVID vaccine injuries are funded under the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which was authorized by the  Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act).

Kennedy said claimants to the program are monumentally outmatched with the “bottomless pockets” of the federal government. “Furthermore, most of the Special Masters come from government, legal, or political posts, and typically display an extreme bias that favors the government side,” Kennedy wrote. “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.”

Kennedy further explained that more than half of the cases are dismissed by the special masters, and the cases that continue will take more than 5 years to resolve, and sometimes more than 10 years. Many of these parents are caring for children with extreme disabilities and are waiting for this financial compensation to help cover the cost of care.

“Petitioners’ attorneys complain that the Special Masters make punitive downward adjustments to attorneys’ fees and medical expert fees to punish effective advocacy,” Kennedy explained. “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.”

James Lyons-Weiler, PhD, backed up Kennedy’s statement about biased special masters leveraging power in a Substack post. Lyons-Weiler served as an expert witness for a claimant in the VICP process, but he departed the program after being bribed for continued work and compensation within the program.

Lyons-Weiler said he testified with the robust science linking aluminum adjuvants to autoimmune conditions “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,” Lyons-Weiler said. “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.”

Lyons-Weiler said during his next expert testimony, he mentioned the bribe on the record, and the recording is held by the plaintiff, several attorneys, and himself. “Its contents will obliterate any illusion that the VICP operates under the rules of ethics or law,” Lyons-Weiler wrote. “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.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) denounced Kennedy’s intent to fix the VICP in an official statement. “We are deeply concerned that Secretary Kennedy’s planned changes to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) will be yet another example of his campaign to set aside the overwhelming weight of medical evidence and use the federal government to stoke fears about vaccines that have no basis in medicine,” the statement said.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo shot back at the AAP following its statement encouraging states to eliminate nonmedical vaccine exemptions. “The AAP lost credibility long ago, flip-flopping on screen time policies to justify school shutdowns during the pandemic, pushing experimental COVID vaccines on kids, and endorsing sex-change surgeries for children,” Ladapo wrote on X. The AAP partners with pharmaceutical companies, including Moderna, Merck, and Sanofi.

The CICP program for COVID-19 vaccine injuries has been under challenge by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) with the firm Siri & Glimstad. The HighWire reported about the lawsuit in November 2023; the case is still ongoing. At the time, there were over 12,000 claims, and only four individuals received compensation. Now, with over 14,400 claims, 69 have been compensated. Only 4,929 cases have received a ruling, with 4,864 outright denials.

Secretary Kennedy has not announced any reforms to the CICP program at this time.