A legal regime created by Congress in the 1980s after a wave of lawsuits over the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine threatened to drive manufacturers from the market. The programme covers more than a dozen mostly childhood jabs and routes claimants to a special vaccine court, where they receive faster and easier payouts than in regular civil court since they do not have to prove fault by vaccine-makers, a higher legal bar. Damages for pain and suffering are capped at $250,000, plus medical expenses and lost wages. Vaccine-makers fund the scheme through an excise tax of 75 cents per jab. In return they are largely shielded from liability in the normal tort system. A separate liability protection covered the covid-19 shot.
Adverse effects from vaccines are statistically rare. Roughly 30,000 are reported to the government annually; about 15% of these are serious. The VICP automatically compensates people for certain injuries if they appear within a set period from the time of the shot. People with other "off-table" injuries can prevail if they show that the vaccine caused theirs. About half of all VICP cases are dismissed. In 60% of compensated claims, the government does not accept that the shot caused the injury but pays to resolve the case anyway. Eight "special masters" (judges) oversee more than 3,500 cases; adjudicating a claim takes between two and three years on average. The number of special masters is inscribed in law and only Congress can increase it.
Preventive vaccines are low-margin products; the risk of huge jury awards would drive firms from the market. The arrangement underpins public health by ensuring that supply stays cheap.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump's health secretary, wants to overhaul the programme, saying it "routinely dismisses meritorious cases" and is a "morass of inefficiency, favouritism and outright corruption". Through the rulemaking process, the health secretary can add injuries to the compensation table or loosen existing definitions. The pandemic scrambled the politics around vaccine injury: MAGA Republicans are now the biggest bashers of pharma on vaccines, whereas plaintiffs' lawyers once aligned neatly with Democrats.
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