The Trump administration is considering adding autism to the list of injuries covered under the federal program aimed at compensating people who have been harmed by vaccines, according to a top adviser to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Changes made to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) have made it virtually impossible for children with regressive encephalopathy to be recognized and compensated, said Andrew Downing, a vaccine injury attorney and senior policy adviser at the HHS.
Downing, speaking Thursday during an autism discussion hosted by the MAHA Institute, said making changes to the VICP to include children with neurological issues is one of the key issues he and Kennedy are working on.
“Part of what Secretary Kennedy is doing right now — with my help, and we have a team looking at it — is, we have to figure out a way to capture these kids,” he said.
The adviser, however, suggested that the administration may not explicitly add autism to the list of injuries for which people can receive compensation.
“If you don’t use the ‘A word’, whatever, that’s fine,” Downing said, referring to autism. “How do we capture them? Do we broaden the definition of encephalopathic events? Do we broaden neurological injuries? Do how do we do that?”
The VICP was created in 1986 to give quick payouts to families who can prove a child was injured from a vaccine. Since it began, the program has paid out approximately $5.4 billion.
Families receive compensation through a trust fund that’s funded by an excise tax on vaccine makers, so there’s a finite pot of money available. The program’s fund covers lawyers’ fees and the costs, even for losing cases.
In exchange for the tax, vaccine makers have a limited liability shield. Petitioners file claims against the federal government, not the manufacturers, and families can get compensation without having to prove that drugmakers were negligent.
Experts say the program is badly in need of modernization, but there’s concern the changes Kennedy wants could bankrupt it or tear it down entirely, at the risk of driving drugmakers from the market and threatening access to childhood shots.
The HHS chief in the past has railed against the program and said he wants to speed up the resolutions and make it easier for claimants to qualify for awards based on general brain dysfunction.
“The VICP no longer functions to achieve its Congressional intent,” Kennedy wrote in a lengthy post on social platform X in July. “I will not allow the VICP to continue to ignore its mandate and fail its mission of quickly and fairly compensating vaccine-injured individuals.”
To add an injury to the list, Kennedy would have to go through the federal government’s cumbersome notice-and-comment rulemaking process.
Experts said it’s usually a time-consuming and expensive undertaking, and often the scientific reviews don’t show enough evidence to prove whether the vaccine caused harm or not.
Kennedy could also unofficially start settling cases for more injuries without adding them to the list.
People can sue manufacturers outside the VICP program, so expanding the program and offering compensation for a larger variety of injuries could reduce that incentive.
