The leader of a national taxpayer advocacy group said that attempting to improve the safety of products, such as vaccines and medicines, through litigation often has the “opposite” effect.
“Litigation certainly has a role to play in ensuring that products are not defective, and companies keep their word. However, what we're seeing now is billion-dollar verdicts grounded in the flimsiest evidence,” Marchand told Patient Daily. “Foisting that model on vaccines will bring back the pre-VICP status quo of manufacturers thinking twice before bringing life-saving products to market.”
TPA is a nonprofit advocacy organization focused on fiscal policy, regulatory oversight and government accountability. The group frequently weighs in on federal liability frameworks and regulatory matters affecting market competition and taxpayer exposure.
Marchand’s comments come as some plaintiffs’ attorneys seek to open up vaccine manufacturers to lawsuits.
In an Inside Health Policy interview published Jan. 12, plaintiffs’ attorney Aaron Siri said that he anticipates U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “will amend the federal Vaccine Injury Table to remove vaccines that are no longer routinely recommended, which would open manufacturers to standard product-liability lawsuits, allowing injured patients to sue vaccine makers like any other company accused of failing to make a product safer or warn of known harms.”
“Once the Vaccine Injury Table is amended to remove the vaccines that are no longer routinely recommended, every attorney in the country will be able to handle vaccine injury claims in the same manner as injury claims from any other product,” Siri said, reported Inside Health Policy.
Siri is managing partner of Siri & Glimstad LLP and “represented Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during his presidential campaign,” Fortune reported in Dec. 2024. That report also said Siri helped Kennedy interview candidates to work at HHS.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was established by Congress in 1986 under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. According to the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, which administers the program, VICP was created in response to vaccine supply instability and rising litigation in the 1980s and provides a no-fault alternative to traditional tort litigation while shielding manufacturers from most direct liability claims.
Marchand said expanding lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers could impact the availability and access to these products.
“That’s exactly what happened before VICP was enacted in 1986,” said Marchand. “According to an analysis by North Dakota State University, high litigation costs led several manufacturers to take their diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccines off the market.”
“Predictably, the price of impacted vaccines skyrocketed,” said Marchand. “Let's not repeat this costly policy mistake.”
Large product-liability settlements have, in some cases, not resulted in products being removed from the market or significantly altered. One example is litigation involving glyphosate-based herbicides.
In 2020, Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, announced it would pay $11 billion to lawyers representing thousands of clients who claimed its glyphosate weedkiller, branded as Roundup, made them sick.
Seven years later, however, glyphosate has never been more popular, reported Business Daily.
More than 90 percent of U.S. farmers still use it, applying as much as 300 million pounds of glyphosate to their fields every year.
“If you ban glyphosate overnight or if you got rid of it, or if somebody else cut off our supply, it would destroy the American food system,” said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who worked on the litigation team suing Monsanto.
Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan that the $11 billion settlement didn’t change anything.
Glyphosate remains the “foundational pesticide of our food production system,” said Kennedy.
Marchand said that, instead of improving product safety, litigation often results in “the opposite because runaway legal costs deter innovation.”
