Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s decisions as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services continue to inject policy that discards science, rejects transparency, and benefits special interests. The results are threatening Americans’ health, their ability to take on drug manufacturers when they suffer injuries, and Republicans’ midterm election prospects.
Kennedy has made personnel moves with an apparent eye toward dismantling the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has protected consumers from runaway healthcare costs and increased Americans’ access to lifesaving and life-enhancing treatments.
VICP establishes a legal pathway for ordinary Americans to receive compensation on the rare occasion that they experience serious side effects from a vaccine. Because of its no-fault structure, it offers something the civil court system does not: a pathway to claims that does not require deep pockets, elite legal counsel, or the endurance to suffer through a lengthy litigation process.
Substantively, underserved communities benefit most from VICP, including those who carry the highest uninsurance rates in the country. Many of those states, including Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma, are ones President Donald Trump won in 2024.
These Americans will be the ones most hurt by the sudden price shocks for routine treatments such as pediatric shots for their children that could occur if Kennedy gets his way. After all, what drove the creation of VICP in the first place nearly 40 years ago was what drove many manufacturers to leave the U.S. market.
It is hard not to conclude that gutting VICP would again generate a deluge of vaccine-injury lawsuits going directly into state-level civil courts. The incentive structure would massively favor trial lawyers and would likely overload VICP with cases until it collapses. Low-income claimants with genuine claims would be forced into a system built for trial lawyers, not for them.
The reality is that the economics of one-off claims brought by low-income victims are not attractive to trial lawyers. Large firms would be incentivized to spurn them in favor of cases that promise high-dollar damages with large contingency fees.
On top of that, manufacturers could respond to the new liability environment by leaving the market, as they did before VICP was created in 1986. Back then, litigation pressure around the DPT vaccine drove manufacturers out, domestic supply contracted, and prices went up.
As Kennedy undermines vaccine injury protection under VICP, he is doing so in conjunction with other changes, including forcibly circumventing scientific recommendations about vaccine use and stacking the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with a slew of appointees with dubious qualifications.
Even after a federal judge blocked these appointments and labeled many of his appointees as “distinctly unqualified,” Kennedy has attempted blatantly to circumvent the ruling, going so far as to issue a new ACIP charter.
Under current law, health insurers cover every ACIP-recommended vaccine in full. Kennedy’s undoing of those recommendations means that the burden will suddenly fall on parents. Throw in Kennedy’s efforts to upend the vaccine supply chain itself, and America risks sliding back to the days of medicinal scarcity and higher costs.
All this despite Kennedy promising he would not “take away” vaccines from those who want them in his confirmation hearings.
The troubling fact is that Kennedy is continuing his long history of deceit by operating under the Make America Healthy Again banner. But while most MAHA participants promote “health freedom,” Kennedy is more concerned about his own financial interests in launching endless lawsuits against medical manufacturers that drive America’s dominance in public health.
The volatility and mayhem that Kennedy is choosing to create rob Americans of the freedom to protect their own families how they best see fit, either by making vaccines prohibitively expensive or inaccessible.
Politically, Kennedy selling out working-class voters’ interests to the trial bar is electorally poisonous across wide swaths of voters, hurting those who swung toward the president in 2024. Americans from the Rust Belt, Appalachia, and the Rio Grande Valley did not turn out to subsidize trial lawyers, an industry that has spent two decades among Democrats’ top funders, and has never been on their side.
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All this in the context of an electorate where affordability is top of mind, and medical costs beat out both rent and food as the public’s top budgetary worry.
Trump’s enthusiastic promise to let Kennedy “go wild on health” is increasingly showing itself to be dangerous, not just for the health and pocketbooks of everyday Americans, but also for Republicans’ electoral chances in the fall.
Mario H. Lopez is the president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, a public policy organization that advocates liberty, opportunity, and prosperity for all Americans.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
