Trump administration plans to reimburse doctors treating vaccine ‘injuries’ | Trump administration

The Trump administration is finalizing a rule to reimburse doctors who diagnose, treat and counsel patients with vaccine side effects, in what experts see as an attempt to undermine confidence in vaccines and create an evidence base for their purported risks.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), also announced the creation of a vaccine “injury” research center at the National Institutes of Health and sought to reshape the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP)—actions that speak to Kennedy’s longstanding anti-vaccination activism as well as the profits he and his network have made from vaccine lawsuits.

Kennedy and his allies also profited from the growing misinformation spread by books, paid lectures, and the supplement industry.

“I think he’s a real ideologue — he really believes in this,” said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at UC Law San Francisco. But Kennedy and his allies are probably “very happy to make money doing it,” she said.

Peter Hotez, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, agrees, saying Kennedy’s actions are likely a combination of “being an ideological fanatic and making money either for himself or his associates.”

Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokeswoman, said the department “categorically rejects allegations that Secretary Kennedy is seeking personal gain or seeking to dismantle American medicine.”

Before his confirmation hearing in January 2025, Kennedy disclosed $2.5 million in income from referrals for vaccine-related lawsuits. At the hearing, Kennedy would not commit to giving up compensation from vaccine-related lawsuits after leaving office. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, listed several ways Kennedy’s actions, some of which have already occurred, could influence future litigation.

“Kennedy can take away access to vaccines and make millions of dollars doing it,” Warren said during the hearing. “Children might die. But Robert Kennedy can continue to profit from it.” She highlighted Kennedy’s involvement in litigation against Merck over its HPV vaccine — suits that were settled for more than $50 million in June 2026. After the confirmation hearing, Kennedy said her son would receive the money, which was expected to be 10% of the total; it is not known whether he did so.

“For most of us, money that goes to our children isn’t exactly money that doesn’t go to us,” Reiss said. “There are a dozen ways he and his family could benefit” from Kennedy’s actions, she added.

Kennedy has long profited from his anti-vaccine misinformation. Tony Lyons, Kennedy’s publisher and central figure in the Maha constellation of political organizations, reportedly paid Kennedy $4 million in book advances over the past year. The publisher also paid Kennedy $451,000 in consulting fees before becoming HHS secretary. This is in addition to other book sales and paid speaking engagements over the years. Kennedy also earned $326,000 for the 15 weeks he served as president of Children’s Health Defense in 2023, more than half of his 2022 salary of $510,000.

Most recently, he received free flights and trips on a yacht from a former donor to his presidential campaign, who is now under Senate investigation for gifts totaling some $250,000.

As HHS secretary, Kennedy also eased regulations on peptides, a booming part of the largely unregulated wellness industry.

“I think he’s doing what everyone knew he was going to do,” Hotez said. Kennedy, before and during his tenure as head of HHS, “eroded public trust in vaccines and immunizations in favor of products that can be sold by the wellness industry,” he added.

Aaron Siri, the former Kennedy lawyer who represents people who say they have suffered serious side effects, has advocated for all vaccines to be subject to “shared clinical decision-making.” If these changes took place, Siri could argue that vaccines are not covered by the VICP and are therefore subject to litigation.

“A lot of what he does is aimed at creating a more cost-effective litigation atmosphere,” Reiss said.

Siri did not respond to the Guardian’s question about whether it could benefit from litigation, but instead argued that “if vaccines are as ‘safe’ as the government claims, then there should be no need for immunity from liability and, similarly, there should be very few, if any, success stories.”

The most common claim about VICP – accounting for more than half – concerns where the vaccine is administered, not the vaccines themselves.

The VICP was created in 1986 to expedite compensation for anyone who suffered adverse side effects from vaccines. Undermining the program comes with real costs, Reiss said. It is very rare for people to develop serious side effects after vaccination, but when they do, they should be compensated, she said. But if false claims about vaccine harms proliferate, they will obscure those with legitimate claims.

Filing a VICP claim is a simpler process than winning a case, which takes time and effort and also requires a higher burden of proof.

“That’s why the whole vaccine injury prevention system was put in place,” Hotez said. “It was actually in the plaintiff’s interest to get a quicker judgment without having to present detailed evidence.”

Without VICP, patients would have to pay attorneys a large portion of their settlements, if their case goes to court, Reiss said: “The lack of a contingency fee means they don’t have to pay 30 to 50 percent of their income through the attorney.”

Paying doctors for reporting side effects to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) risks providing “bad incentives” to unscrupulous providers who might expand these activities to become a new revenue stream, Reiss said.

These changes could “certainly” be used by organizations like Children’s Health Defense to legitimize its work spreading misinformation “and convince donors and others that they should give them more money,” she added.

VAERS, alongside several other vaccine monitoring systems, works well at detecting signals of very rare side effects, such as myocarditis from the initial mRNA Covid vaccines and thrombotic thrombocytopenia from the Johnson and Johnson Covid vaccine, Hotez noted. But it is not designed to prove links between vaccines and certain side effects, as opponents of vaccination have tried to do, he said.

“The VAERS system was never designed to show cause and effect,” Hotez said. “It’s like looking for signs of extraterrestrial communication in space. You look at every little incident, and almost all of them are nothing, not real. But you have to analyze them.”

Years ago, Hotez engaged Kennedy in a series of conversations about misinformation that autism spectrum disorders are linked to vaccines. Hotez pointed to known environmental influences on autism, such as the anti-seizure drug valproic acid. Kennedy “had no interest at the time; he has no interest in it now,” Hotez said. “Even back then, the focus was on being a plaintiff’s lawyer and suing vaccine manufacturers. So that’s his narrow interest, which has nothing to do with reality – and he still follows the same pattern.”

Kennedy attacked medical journals and schools, and funding for medical research fell sharply under his leadership. Such actions appear intended to “completely wipe out American medicine as we know it in favor of this whole system of fraud and pseudoscience,” Hotez said.