Payouts by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program have now topped $4B [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Payouts by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program have now topped $4B [pdf]

hrsa.gov

10 pointssahin9 comments

I believe in vaccination and my kids are vaccinated. We were lucky that we didnt have any side effects.

Number of

Doses Distributed in the U.S. 3B+ vaccinations -> 6000 cases

seems pretty low.

keep in mind this program only compensates victims of adverse reactions, but that’s only one of many different types of iatrogenic harms that can be caused by vaccines.

Really? The text given suggests otherwise:

This program also compensates court decisions (even if HHS believes "the injury was not caused by the vaccine") and settlements ("75 percent of all compensation awarded by the VICP comes as result of a negotiated settlement between the parties in which HHS has not concluded, based upon review of the evidence, that the alleged vaccine(s) caused the alleged injury").

Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court#Previous_rulings :

> This ruling held that tetanus vaccine caused a particular case of optic neuritis even though no scientific evidence supported the petitioner's claim.[15] Other rulings have allowed petitioners to gain awards for claims that the MMR vaccine causes fibromyalgia, that the Hib vaccine causes transverse myelitis, and that the hepatitis B vaccine causes Guillain–Barré syndrome, chronic demyelinating polyneuropathy, and multiple sclerosis.[15] In the most extreme of these cases, a 2006 petitioner successfully claimed that a hepatitis B vaccine caused her multiple sclerosis despite several studies showing that the vaccine neither causes nor worsens the disease, and despite a conclusion by the Institute of Medicine that evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship.[15]

That certainly sounds to me like the program compensates more than just victims of adverse reactions.

> That certainly sounds to me like the program compensates more than just victims of adverse reactions.

All of those examples are for things caused by the vaccine itself though. They're not including things like, say, people who got HIV due to medical staff reusing needles while giving vaccinations.

1) they are not all "caused by the vaccine itself." I even quoted how payments have happened when "the injury was not caused by the vaccine".

2) The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 only covers manufacturers, not healthcare workers, and doesn't protect manufacturers who fail to exercise due care. Thus there would be no payout from your example because it's not covered. Instead, the healthcare provider can be sued directly for medical malpractice.

So they should also compensate for reactions that aren't adverse?

I'm not really sure what your point is.

I interpreted Alex3917's "adverse reactions" to mean those listed on the Vaccine Injury Table - https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/vaccinecompensation... .

Those are the ones which are presumed to have been caused by the vaccination without going through a court case or settlement.

The supreme court of the USA has ruled that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe. That is a fact that one should think about for a minute.

This is incorrect. In Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, the supreme court ruled that The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 protected vaccine manufacturers from being sued over "unavoidable, adverse side effects". For example, you can sue if a vaccine manufacturer screws up and replaces your vaccine with poison. You can not sue because you think that the vaccine has caused your child's seizures.

I don't believe, at any point, the supreme court has ever examined whether or not vaccines are safe. The ruling here was only about what kind of cases manufacturers were liable to be sued, and it was determined that "vaccines caused my child seizures" was not such a case.

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