The “End the Vaccine Carveout Act” is long overdue!
Since the late 1980’s, Americans have not been able to sue vaccine manufacturers for injury or death due to vaccines. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), better known as the 1986 Act, removed liability from vaccine manufacturers and created an alternative to the constitutional legal process.
As a result, thousands of Americans have been left stranded by an overwhelmed and underperforming vaccine court, unable to get support – let alone justice – for themselves and their loved ones. All this could change with the End the Vaccine Carveout Act introduced September 25, 2024. The bill would restore our constitutional right to a jury trial.
1986 Act background
In the 1980s, Congress wanted kids to have vaccines, but it was also struggling with pressure from manufacturers trying to get out of the business. Children were seriously injured, disabled for life, or dying from vaccines. Despite this, it was Congress’ intent to continue the public health policy of recommending and buying vaccines for American children. But they had to address vaccine shortages in the wake of disastrous and tragic polio and DTP vaccines causing death, disability, and long term injury. And the injuries led to lawsuits and huge monetary awards for grieving families. Congress was looking for a way to keep vaccine manufacturers in business, and the only way to stay in business is if you make more money than you lose.
Why did manufacturers want to stop making vaccines? One legal scholar described a 1974 case where a court found that the maker of the polio vaccine had a duty to warn about the dangers of getting polio from the vaccine itself and, since there was no warning given, an injured man won his case.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers could read the writing on the wall. If they kept making the vaccines, they would be sued out of existence. They started pulling out of the business. This is the way the legal system protects Americans from unsafe products. The courts were working just as our founding fathers intended.
The federal government, however, was invested in vaccines as a public policy. After the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, the federal government turned its focus to vaccines. Since then, billions of American tax dollars are estimated to have been pumped into military, NIH, academic, and private research into finding vaccines for as many illnesses as possible, starting with those that affected our military, then our children, and now all adults.
Congress took away our constitutional right to sue
At a Senate hearing in December 1985 to debate the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act, Senator Robert Stafford delivered opening remarks attesting to the desire to minimize injury and promise safe vaccines, while compensating families quickly when they were “quite literally sacrificing some men, women, and children for the greater good,” by using “unavoidably unsafe” products.
Why did the 1986 Act come about? Legislators and manufacturers were looking at the bottom line while families were looking at injuries and death. Opening statements at the same hearing by Senator Orrin Hatch cited the “tremendous increases in cost for essential immunization programs.” Testimony came from Dr. Martin Smith of the American Academy of Pediatrics who said, “The threat to our vaccine supply in this country is a real one. The loss of vaccine manufacturers coupled with the rapid escalation in vaccine costs could place our children at risk of preventable diseases. We could lose the remainder of our suppliers unless some positive legislative action is taken” (emphasis added).
While the economics of vaccines were being desperately and hotly debated, parent advocates worked with Congress to create a law that would attempt to balance the interests of pharmaceutical companies with the desire of the government to maximize vaccine uptake, as well as the need for parents to know the safety risk of the products being recommended for their children. As a result of this difficult and tiresome advocacy work, Congress didn’t just create vaccine court, it also put in place crucial safety monitoring.
Along with creating vaccine court, the 1986 Act led to:
- Vaccine Information Statements required to be given before administration.
- Details of vaccine administration recorded, including lot numbers.
- Safety concerns reported by providers after vaccination to a new Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
- Development of a new Advisory Committee on Childhood Vaccination charged with monitoring the injuries in the vaccine court and advising the new National Vaccine Program.
After spending billions of our tax dollars to develop and distribute “unavoidably unsafe” vaccines, the federal government has paid over $5.2 billion more dollars to Americans hurt or killed by vaccines since 1988. As of September 2024, there have been 27,702 petitions filed (excluding the 13,000 + for COVID under a different program) and 11,233 have been compensated.
And this doesn’t even touch the cost of health care for chronic conditions, which many attribute to toxins, including those in vaccines.
The time is long overdue to remedy this broken promise from our federal government. The End the Vaccine Carveout Act will restore Americans’ constitutional right to sue when they are injured by an unsafe product.