Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services is exploring making it easier for people who claim they were injured by Covid-19 treatments to get government payouts.
In a noticed published on July 1, HHS outlined its plans to create a specific list of injuries it would presume were caused by Covid measures such as vaccines.
The so-called “injury table” would lay out ailments “based on compelling, reliable, valid, medical, and scientific evidence” that are “presumed to be caused by covered COVID-19 countermeasures,” the notice claims.
If people were impacted by one of those conditions during a specific timeframe, it would make it easier seek benefits under the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program. At the present, injury tables for the benefit program only exist for smallpox and H1N1 influenza.
Critics argued the change, which HHS says it will describe in more detail in November, could allow Kennedy to further his often-unfounded vaccine skepticism without scrutiny, given that injury table claims do not require people to prove the cause of their injuries and are not reviewable by any court.
“That would be scientifically unsound,” pharmaceutical attorney Richard Hughes IV told The Hill, warning that the appearance of benefits to Covid critics could be “politically useful in the current environment.”
The Independent has contacted HHS and the HRSA for comment.
The Covid vaccines are credited with saving millions of lives, though in rare cases they cause side effects, including myocarditis, which is the inflammation of tissue in the heart.
Dr. Joseph Wu, director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, who has studied the condition, told a university website last year that even with this risk, getting vaccines remains vital because “Covid’s worse.”
Kennedy, who led an anti-vaccine group before serving in the Trump administration, has elevated vaccine-skeptics in office and vowed last year he would “fix” a separate vaccine-related compensation program.
The Trump administration also pulled back on nearly $500 million in contracts to develop future mRNA vaccines, the technology used in the Covid jab.
The decision could stymie research on vaccines that could save some 50,000 American lives annually and contribute $75 billion annually to the economy, a recent study from the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis found.
