Blanket Immunity for Vaccine Manufacturers

Swann: Let’s talk about this issue of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program because most Americans, I would guess have no idea that this even exists.

Blaxill: Well, the thing that people should know about the VICP is that it is unlike any other product liability circumstance that any of us deal with on a regular basis. In 1986, Congress passed a law that gave a blanket exemption to pharmaceutical companies from any liability at all for any injury that their products, in this case vaccines, may cause to consumers and especially to children and infants. And what that did, was that put in place a liability shield on the pharmaceutical industry unlike any other pharmaceutical product categories so that if anything wrong happens to any recipient of the vaccine, what the family has to do is to, instead of just going to regular civil court with all the normal checks and balances and procedures and protections we see in the American legal system, they are forced to petition of government to recognize the injury to their child and to decide on whether or not they deserve an compensation.

So for parents, like Blaxill, why does he believe the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has failed?

That goes back to 2002 when nearly five thousand families filed petitions with the VICP claiming that vaccines had caused their children’s neurological disorder called “autism.”

According to the Pace Law Review, in an unprecedented proceeding, the VICP created and conducted the Omnibus Autism Proceeding that concluded in 2010. That means instead of taking the cases one at at time, they consolidated hearings for all these families. in the end, the VICP dismissed all the “test case” claims of vaccine-induced autism.

Blaxill: The original intent of the VICP was to provide a no fault, generous, rapid program of compensating victims. Now what we have a is a cover up. And a situation in which the government is trying to say, these things which people think they have observed, not only are we going to discount it, we are going to treat it with prejudice. We are going to say…

Swann: That this person is trying to get over on the system, that they are gaming the system.

Blaxill: That they are gaming the system, they are trying to blame, they are trying to get money from the government and that’s just wrong.