Kennedy Jr., the federal health department is undertaking an agency-wide effort to focus on injuries claimed to be related to vaccines. In a press announcement Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) laid out four aspects of the large-scale initiative. The first is a new clinic at the National Institutes of Health that is “dedicated to studying and caring for patients experiencing health problems following vaccination.” Despite only being announced today, the clinic actually opened October 5, and Kennedy secretly attended its ribbon-cutting ceremony alongside other high-level Trump administration officials.
It’s unclear why his visit and the clinic’s opening were not disclosed by the Trump administration, but they were reported by Bloomberg Law at the time. Another aspect of the initiative is a proposal to reimburse doctors for reporting possible injuries from vaccines to a federal system called VAERS, or the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. VAERS, which is run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a common focus of anti-vaccine advocates, who incessantly misuse it.
The system is meant to be an indiscriminate dragnet of any potential safety concerns linked to vaccines, providing a sensitive early warning monitoring system. Anyone, including members of the public, can submit an unvetted report. The CDC continuously monitors and assesses those reports, finding that the vast majority are not actually related to vaccinations.
Still, anti-vaccine advocates—particularly those involved in litigation seeking money for alleged vaccine injuries—often point to the trove of unsubstantiated reports on VAERS as evidence that vaccines are dangerous. HHS said the proposal to reimburse doctors for filing VAERS reports will “reduce barriers to physician reporting and encourage health care professionals to document suspected adverse events following vaccination.” The announcement did not make clear how doctors would be paid for VAERS reports, but The New York Times reported that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) may introduce a new billing code to reimburse doctors.
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