Will Walters and Richard Hughes, attorneys and health care policy experts at Epstein Becker & Green, P.C., said on April 23 that recent quiet from the administration regarding vaccines should not be interpreted as a lasting shift in federal vaccine policy.
“This lull in anti-vaccine rhetoric and action should not be mistaken for a durable pivot in federal vaccine policy. It is a cynical, political pause: the eye of a storm shaped more by electoral timing than public health strategy. We are likely to be in for a rude awakening once the political incentives to remain quiet disappear. The storm has not passed," Walters and Hughes said in a joint statement.
The attorneys represent plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit challenging changes to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) vaccine policies. They say the administration's silence masks ongoing structural changes influenced by trial lawyer financial interests.
HHS quietly published an updated charter for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that elevates monitoring of vaccine adverse events to a primary function and adds four organizations that promote debunked links between vaccines and autism, according to the revised charter posted April 6. The changes align with revisions petitioned by an anti-vaccine organization associated with an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The personal attorney for HHS leadership had more than 100 cases pending before the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program while simultaneously advising the administration on vaccine policy and vetting candidates for the agency, federal filings and court records showed. His firm stands to benefit financially from any expansion of vaccine injury claims or weakening of manufacturer protections.
The FDA-approved Lyme disease vaccine LYMErix was pulled from the market in 2002 after litigation made it commercially unviable, despite no plaintiff receiving compensation and trial lawyers collecting more than $1 million in fees, according to published accounts. An estimated 476,000 Americans contract Lyme disease annually with no vaccine available.
The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has distributed more than $5.4 billion to claimants since 1988, providing a no-fault path for patients harmed by vaccines without requiring costly litigation, HRSA data showed. A Cornell survey found 78 percent of health policy experts said weakening the program would reduce pharmaceutical investment in new vaccines.
