Congress gave pharma a total liability shield, so the industry is untouchable

“Liability-free doctors should never be given the power to force us to play vaccine roulette with liability-free vaccines. And corporations marketing pharmaceutical products that can injure and kill us and our children should never be given the shield for legal accountability for the safety of their products in a civil court of law in the form of a jury of our peers.

In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act after drug companies threatened to leave America without a childhood vaccine supply if they were not protected from vaccine injury lawsuits. The 1986 law confirmed that vaccines can injure and kill, and gave partial liability protection to vaccine manufacturers and pediatricians by creating a federal vaccine injury compensation system alternative to a vaccine injury lawsuit.

Congress promised parents that a compensation program would be a no-fault, non-adversarial, expedited, less expensive and less traumatic administrative alternative to suing pharmaceutical corporations and negligent doctors in civil court. Parents were promised that the historic vaccine informing, reporting, recording, and research safety provisions secured by the co-founders of the National Vaccine Information Center into that law would be enforced.

In 2011, when the US Supreme Court declared that vaccines were ‘unavoidably unsafe’ and effectively handed the pharmaceutical industry a total liability shield from vaccine injury lawsuits, even when there’s evidence that a drug company could have made a vaccine safe, the compensation program became the exclusive legal remedy for vaccine injured Americans… and with that free pass, government and industry immediately moved into state legislatures to eliminate personal belief vaccine exemptions, as well as limit or eliminate federal compensation for vaccine injured children.

Every single promise that Congress made to parents in 1986 was a lie, in what has become a profound betrayal of public trust. The social contract… with parents obeying vaccine laws in America has been irreparably broken. Although $3 billion has been awarded to about 4,000 victims, there are $3 billion still sitting in a trust fund, because government fights every single claim, and two out of three vaccine injured persons are turned away empty handed. The majority of awards today are paid to adults injured by flu vaccine, and not to children who suffer brain inflammation and are disabled for the rest of their lives after receiving one or more of the 16 government recommended and state mandated vaccines.

The Secretary of Health and Justice department lawyers drag out the compensation claims process for years and have gutted the rules for compensation so that few children qualify, turning the program into a cruel imitation of a court trial with no jury. Doctors giving vaccines refuse to obey the vaccine safety provisions because there is no enforcement. Congress has failed to provide oversight on the 1986 law, allowing government agencies to deliberately destroy the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and turn it into a drug company stockholder’s dream and a parent’s worst nightmare.

The 1986 law is a failed experiment in tort reform and it should be repealed. The pharmaceutical industry and medical doctors must be held fully accountable and liable for vaccine injuries and deaths in civil court, and every public health law must include informed consent protections in the form of personal, medical, religious and conscientious belief vaccine exemptions.”

— Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), Atlanta, GA, October 24, 2015