Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is vowing to overhaul a long-ignored government program that was supposed to help vaccine-injured Americans—but instead became a fortress protecting pharmaceutical giants.
In a fiery new statement posted to X, Kennedy blasted the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a shadowy tribunal system created by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. The law granted sweeping legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers, effectively insulating them from lawsuits even when their products caused harm. In exchange, the VICP was supposed to provide quick and fair compensation to the injured.
That promise, according to Kennedy, was a lie.
“For nearly 40 years, the government has failed its own mandate,” Kennedy wrote. “The structure itself hobbles claimants.” He detailed how the court pits injured children and their families against not vaccine makers—but against the full legal power of the U.S. government, represented by the Department of Justice.
Kennedy, long known for exposing Big Pharma’s backroom deals, reminded Americans why the 1986 law was passed in the first place. At the time, vaccine manufacturers like Wyeth (now part of Pfizer) faced mounting lawsuits over injuries. Wyeth threatened to stop making vaccines altogether unless they were shielded from liability. When President Reagan pushed back and urged them to make safer products, Wyeth replied that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe”—a term that later found its way into Supreme Court rulings.
The result was a taxpayer-funded vaccine court system that Kennedy says has failed miserably. In nearly four decades, it has awarded just $5.4 billion to about 12,000 victims—roughly one award for every million doses administered.
That slow, selective trickle of justice wasn’t the intent, Kennedy argues. The court was supposed to resolve claims quickly and lean in favor of victims when causation was unclear. Instead, he says, the system has become rigged. Special Masters who decide the cases often come from government or political circles and are prone to pro-government bias. There’s no discovery process, and standard rules of evidence don’t apply.
Kennedy’s statement also detailed a disturbing culture of retaliation against attorneys and medical experts who support injured families. Some doctors who’ve testified for victims reportedly lost funding from the National Institutes of Health, while petitioners’ lawyers have faced fee suppression and denial of access to key databases like the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink.
“This is not justice,” Kennedy wrote. “This is government-protected stonewalling.”
But that’s about to change, he vowed.
“The VICP is broken, and I intend to fix it,” he declared. Working closely with Attorney General Pam Bondi and a handpicked team inside HHS, Kennedy says he’s committed to restoring the court’s original mission. “I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate.”
Kennedy’s announcement could mark a major turning point in the national debate over vaccine injury and medical accountability. And with him now wielding power inside the same department that once defended the status quo, the vaccine court may finally face the reckoning critics have warned about for decades.