Vaccines Injure and Cause Death: 2,500 Claims of Vaccine-induced Injury and $2 Billion in Compensation

Vaccines, like all prescription medicines, carry risks—the law considers them to be “unavoidably unsafe.” Because the government and medical community want to ensure high vaccination rates, they do not publicize this legal fact. To the contrary, they tell the public that “vaccines are safe and effective.” The public is lulled into believing that vaccines are almost perfectly risk free. That, however, is public relations. In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (“the Act”) in part to compensate families for “vaccine-related injury or death.” In the name of protecting children’s health, the Act changed the legal landscape fundamentally. Instead of keeping doctors and the vaccine industry directly liable for adverse reactions to vaccines, the Act created a taxpayer-financed compensation program for injuries. Unprecedented at that time, the Act was, in effect, a corporate bailout for the pharmaceutical industry, forcing the public—rather than the industry—to pay for damage from “unavoidably unsafe” products. Thus the Act deprived children of two of the most significant legal protections they had to ensure safety and remedial compensation: informed consent and the right to sue manufacturers directly.