Public health groups urge ACCV to protect due process in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

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BCHC joined more than 30 other health organizations to express strong support for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) and urge the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines to uphold the VICP’s due process.

The VICP was created to ensure that, in exchange for broad vaccine access and liability protections for manufacturers, individuals who experience rare but serious vaccine-related injuries have access to compensation. The program is integral to vaccine infrastructure, and allows Americans to protect one another by taking vaccines, while also ensuring that biopharmaceutical companies continue to invest in vaccine clinical development. 

The VICP has been heralded as a success. As of 2023, almost 9,500 people have been paid more than $4.5 billion since the program’s 1988 inception. As stated by Dr. Reed Grimes, Director of the Division of Injury Compensation Programs in the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA): “In the last five years, 77-78 percent of adjudicated claims have resulted in compensation, reflecting the program’s deliberate policy choice to err on the side of fairness and efficiency for claimants while preserving vaccine confidence and supply.” 

While there are substantive updates that would help improve the program, any changes to the VICP must follow the requirements for notice and comment periods and allow for meaningful opportunities for public stakeholder input. The VICP plays an integral role in public trust and vaccine confidence, and modifications must be made through traditional and transparent processes. 

Our organizations are also very concerned about efforts to add autism or autism symptoms to the Vaccine Injury Table. The VICP program was built on the principle of  compensation without causation, a fragile balance designed to sustain both trust and supply, and adding autism would collapse that distinction entirely. Federal estimates suggest up to 48,000 children could qualify immediately under a “profound autism” standard at an initial cost of nearly $100 billion, followed by annual totals of about $30 billion a year —dwarfing the current $4 billion trust, a new analysis finds.

In addition, multiple studies conducted in several different countries have demonstrated that there is no causal association between vaccines or their preservatives and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Vaccines do not change the timing of the onset of ASD symptoms, nor do they affect the severity of ASD symptoms. Vaccines are one of the greatest success stories in all of medicine, and the continued, baseless push to suggest otherwise needs to stop.

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