The national conversation on vaccine injury and accountability has returned—this time from within the halls of power. On July 28, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a blistering rebuke of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), calling it a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption. His statement follows decades of criticism from researchers, patient advocates, and injured families who have watched the program drift further from its original mission: to compensate those injured by vaccines swiftly and fairly, in exchange for protecting manufacturers from lawsuits.

But now, the call is coming from inside the building—and so are the corroborating accounts. I speak from personal experience.

A System Designed to Protect Industry, Not People

Established in 1986 under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the VICP was sold to the public as a compromise. Vaccine makers would be shielded from product liability lawsuits, but a special court would hear injury claims and disburse funds from a trust financed by a 75-cent surcharge on every dose. The result was a legal anomaly: a taxpayer-funded compensation system adjudicated by government attorneys and so-called Special Masters, immune from civil discovery, unbound by the rules of evidence, and utterly inaccessible to traditional tort remedies.

It is, in every material sense, a system rigged against the injured.

More than 12,000 petitioners have received compensation totaling over $5.4 billion, but this figure hides more than it reveals. The average payout may hover around $450,000, but cases can drag on for years. Worse, over half of all claims are denied—often without genuine examination of mechanistic plausibility or patient history.

And contrary to public assumption, most of these awards are not for injured children, but for adults—many of them harmed by influenza vaccines and other products routinely administered to working-age populations. This pattern directly undercuts the common refrain that VICP is merely a safeguard for pediatric vaccination. It is not. It is a backdoor bailout system for manufacturers—deliberately kept quiet, procedurally opaque, and inaccessible to public scrutiny. …

Legal Immunity Is the Enemy of Innovation

The claim that loss of immunity will halt vaccine development is not only false—it is dangerously backward. In fact:

Loss of immunity will force vaccine makers to innovate.

Without accountability, companies have no incentive to improve adjuvants, reduce contamination, study long-term risks, or design surveillance systems that detect harm in real-time. The current regime has enabled stagnation. Nearly all pediatric vaccines on the schedule are based on decades-old platforms. The most rapid innovation—mRNA—was released under EUA without liability and now shows signals of myocarditis, menstrual irregularities, and other systemic effects that the courts may never adjudicate.

In no other industry is this tolerated. Heart valve makers, prosthetics manufacturers, and psychiatric drug developers all face liability. They still operate. They still innovate. They improve because they must.

Shielding vaccines from legal challenge has not increased safety—it has buried it. …

Conclusion: The Shield Is Cracking

For decades, vaccine liability has been off-limits, protected by layers of legal abstraction and media silence. Now, with a reformer at the helm of HHS and credible insider testimony—mine included—exposing bribery within the program itself, the silence is breaking.

The VICP cannot be patched. It must be reimagined—or replaced entirely. The goal is not to dismantle public health. It is to restore it through accountability, transparency, and respect for those who paid the price in silence.

That silence ends now. Vaccine liability is back on the table.