Dr. Paul Offit, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and director of the Vaccine Education Center in Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, has played with Kennedy about vaccines for years. Offit fears that Kennedy will use lack of studies to justify the addition of autism and other common medical problems at the injury, regardless of how much they are contrary to robust scientific research.
“You can do that, and you will let the program go bankrupt,” he said. “These are ways to put an end to vaccine production in this country.”
If the Trustfonds no longer had money, the congress should act, Dorit Reiss, professor of Law at the University of California Law San Francisco who studied the vaccine compensation program. The congress could increase the excise duty on vaccines, she said, or take a law that limits what is on the injury table. Or the congress could abolish the program, and the vaccine makers would return to the situation with which they were confronted in the 1980s.
“That is not unrealistic,” Reiss said.
Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, presented the end of the vaccine Careout Act last year, so that people can bypass the no-fault system and go directly to the civil court. His press release for the account – written in September, before Kennedy's Ascension to HHS Secretary – combined Kennedy and said, “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we must end the liability shield.”
The legislation never occurred for a vote. A spokesperson for the congressman said that he expects to re -introduce it in the very near future '.
Renée Gentry, director of the vaccine injury clinic of the George Washington University Law School, thinks it is unlikely that the congress will blow up the no-fault program. But Gentry, who represents people who submit claims for injuries, said it is difficult to predict what the congress, confronted with a Doomsday scenario, would do.
“Normally, Democrats are friends of the lawyers of claimants,” she said. “But talking about vaccines on the hill is like walking on a razor blade on fire.”
