Team Trump Mulls Adding Autism Symptoms To Vaccine Injury Program

The Trump administration is considering ways to allow people with autism to seek compensation through a government vaccine injury program, according to an adviser, in a change likely to throw it into disarray.

The program, called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, shields companies from most lawsuits and includes a fund that pays people who experience a serious reaction to a covered vaccine. It's paid out about $5 billion since 1988. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has railed against the program for being too miserly for people with vaccine injuries and too difficult to navigate. He has the authority in his role to change what conditions people can file compensation claims for, though the process could take months. 

If he moves forward with the changes, it could radically transform a federal program that was initially formed after a wave of lawsuits against vaccine makers in the 1980s forced shot makers to take their products off the market and led to shortages.

"We have a team looking at it," Andrew Downing, an attorney specializing in vaccine injury cases and adviser to Kennedy, said at an event in Washington on Thursday. "We have to figure out a way to capture these kids," he said, referring to children with autism.

Kennedy has long been fixated on autism and its connection with vaccines. He served as chair of Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit that files lawsuits. Changes to VICP would mark his latest attempt to tie vaccines to autism.

If Kennedy moves forward, it could overwhelm the VICP program and lead to a backlog of cases. In the early 2000s, more than 5,000 cases were submitted by families claiming that vaccines had caused their child's autism. The massive volume of claims led to the creation of a special program to adjudicate all the cases, which were eventually rejected by the courts.

"This would break the program," said Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, referring to the potential cost of compensating for autism, which affects roughly 1 in 31 US children. The program typically covers medical and related expenses, lost future income and up to $250,000 for pain and suffering.

"Where is the evidence? The claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism has been disproven, the claims about thimerosal have been disproven," Offit said, referring to the mercury-based preservative historically used in some vaccines that's been falsely linked to autism. "This is a decision without any evidence."

Kennedy and Offit have a history of public conflict over vaccine policy, and Offit was recently removed from a panel of vaccine experts that advises the Food and Drug Administration.

Downing said Kennedy may not plan to explicitly add autism to the list of injuries for which people can receive compensation. Instead HHS officials are considering expanding the list of symptoms to include those that people with autism often experience, creating an indirect opening for them to seek funds.

"You know, if you don't want to use the 'a' word, whatever, that's fine," Downing said. "How do we capture them ... do we broaden the definition of encephalopathic events? Do we broaden neurological injuries? How do we do that?"

Other politicians, including both Democrats and Republicans, have proposed reforms to vaccine injury programs. They've floated changes to a separate program that covers vaccines developed in response to public health emergencies like Covid-19. The programs have an arcane structure and exclude some vaccines that are recommended by public health agencies. 

Lawmakers of both parties have designed the legislation to address backups in reviewing claims and complaints it offers too little compensation.

The VICP program is funded by a 75-cent tax on each dose of vaccines recommended for routine use in children. It has a roughly three-year statute of limitations.

A spokesman for HHS declined to comment.

Kennedy's plan could be a good thing for vaccine makers, further shielding them from people suing them directly, said Renee Gentry, director of the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at the George Washington University Law School.

Expanding the program to offer compensation for a larger variety of injuries may reduce the incentive to sue manufacturers, she said. "That's what the program was designed to do."

But Kennedy's plan may also further erode trust in vaccines by supporting the debunked idea that they can cause autism, Gentry said.

"People cast it in a different light to serve their agendas," she said. "And that's when things get dangerous."

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)