Feb 25 2011
Supreme Court Decision on Vaccine Injury
I previously wrote about the case of Hannah Bruesewitz, a girl who developed a seizure disorder soon after receiving her third in a series of five DTwP vaccines. (You may want to read the previous post before going on, and this post is a follow up.) To briefly recap – Hannah’s parents claim that the DTwP vaccine caused their daughter’s brain injury and seizure disorder. They sued in vaccine court and their case was dismissed. So they decided to file a civil suit.
The Supreme Court has now ruled on whether or not the parents can sue in civil court for an alleged vaccine injury – and they decided 6-2 that the answer is no.
There are a couple of issues here. One (which was actually not the focus of the SC ruling) is whether or not the DTwP vaccine causes neurological injury. I reviewed the literature in my last post – essentially the evidence is against a link between this vaccine and any neurological injury. However, the DTwP has largely been replaced with the DTaP vaccine, which is potentially safer.
The Bruesewitz’s case is that the vaccine manufacturer, Wyeth (now owned by Pfizer), were slow to update their vaccine from DTwP to DTaP, and this resulted in Hannah getting the older vaccine which caused her injury. This relates to the purpose of the vaccine court.
In 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act created a special court, the vaccine court, the purpose of which is to provide an alternate method for determining who deserves compensation for a possible vaccine injury. The vaccine court functions to protect both citizens and vaccine manufacturers. It provides an expedited route to compensation, with a generously low threshold for evidence. For certain listed injuries, compensation is automatic.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act “reflects a sensible choice to leave complex epidemiological judgments about vaccine design to the FDA and the National Vaccine Program rather than juries,” Justice Scalia wrote on behalf of the Court.
This does not mean that vaccine manufacturers cannot be held accountable for the quality of their products. Essentially this means that they cannot be sued for any side effect of vaccines. These are considered unavoidable risks, risks which we accept because they are vastly outweighed by the benefits. The vaccine court compensates those who may have suffered a side effect. Without this avenue vaccine manufacturing in this country would not be viable.
But vaccine manufacturers can still be held accountable for avoidable harm due to a manufacturing defect. And this was the focus of the recent Supreme Court decision – did Hannah suffer from the result of a manufacturing defect? Should the alleged delay in updating from DTwP to DTaP be considered a manufacturing defect? The Supreme Court’s answer is no.
This is an important decision because otherwise, if the definition of “manufacturing defect” were expanded, it could open the flood gates to a host of law suits against the vaccine industry. The anti-vaccine movement would exploit this to bring down the vaccine industry – which is their stated goal.
Orac goes into more detail on this issue if you are interested, including a review of the Health Ranger’s frothing anarchistic paranoia about the topic.
11 Responses to “Supreme Court Decision on Vaccine Injury”
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The anti-vaccine movement is a waste of time, vaccines have changed our world for the better.
Vaccines are important for our continuation in the physical world. Thy physical/material world is not the only world.
There is a much larger reality which we belong to.
Our Soul comes to the material world for a short while in order to learn and grow into oneness.
Once we have finished our course here we will leave this reality and we will merge into the light.
At Death our physical bodies will be shed and will return from where it came. However our Souls will be set free.
I think Vaccines are important because they keep our physical bodies healthy and enable our Souls to accomplish what they came here to do.
Mike’s tirade in NaturalNews would be entered as evidence in court
if any of his followers succeeded in his jihad against “the conspirators” in the U.S.
I find it interesting that there is a vaccine court for supposed vaccine-related injuries. Are there similar courts for other medical devices, treatments, or drugs?
Ah, SA, you are so cute.
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I actually have an argument against any compensation for vaccine injury:
If there were no vaccines there would a great deal more injury from the infections that the vaccines prevent. Injury caused by the actual infections of course go uncompensated. So, how is it that vaccines, which dramatically reduce the number of injuries caused by infections, result in compensation for the injury that they do cause.
For example, measles causes SSPE at a rate of 1 in 100,000. The measles vaccine causes SSPE at a rate of 1 in 1,000,000. Why should you be compensated for SSPE caused by the vaccine when it actually reduced your risk of this disease from 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 1,000,000?
BillyJoe7,
I see it as simply as looking after our own. We know everyone is better off if everyone who can have a vaccine does. We also know that a very small fraction of those people will be harmed by the vaccine itself, so we make a deal to look after the ones who are.
At the end of the day pragmatism needs to win out. You could argue that no-one should be compensated because vaccine side-effects are rare and just part of life for the unlucky few, but that isn’t going to help the uptake rates. Personally I’m happy for some of my tax money (though I’m not in the U.S.) to go to those who did the right thing for society and got burned.
I think a better argument for compensating the rare vaccine injuries is that because the value of vaccines is so high, that so many sicknesses are prevented, so many deaths and permanent injuries are prevented, that the vast population that benefits has surplus “value” that is not captured in the price of the vaccine. Capturing some of that value and allocating it to those who are injured is a way of reducing the “cost” of vaccines still more, the “cost” of rare vaccine injuries being not equally distributed except through monetary compensation.
thequiet1:
“I see it as simply as looking after our own. ”
That would be an argument for compensating vaccine injury AND injury sustained by those who get the infections.
“that isn’t going to help the uptake rates.”
Is there evidence that that is the case? Why wouldn’t people vaccinate because of the reduced chance of injury of those who are vaccinated compared to those who are not? Why wouldn’t compensating vaccine injury just highlight the fact that vaccines cause injury and reduce vaccination rates?
“Why wouldn’t people vaccinate because of the reduced chance of injury of those who are vaccinated compared to those who are not? Why wouldn’t compensating vaccine injury just highlight the fact that vaccines cause injury and reduce vaccination rates?”
I imagine that each of those things may be true in at least some people. eg some people would have vaccinated anyway (I certainly would have), some people (notably anti-vaxers) interpret the vaccine court’s existence as a tacit admission that Big Pharma is crooked, etc. And, some people would have thought “heck, if I’ll wear all the risk of an adverse outcome on my own, there’s no way I’ll vaccinate”. Each seeming illogical to a subscriber to the other.
I would guess that the thinking (possibly based on polls or studies, I don’t know) focussed on that last group, and decided that that the compensation scheme was most likley to achieve the highest level of confidence overall (and thereby vaccination rate), in the face of the decision to limit the liability of manufacturers.
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daedalus2u, you have stated my position better than I did.
BillyJoe7,
“Why wouldn’t people vaccinate because of the reduced chance of injury of those who are vaccinated compared to those who are not?”
Why don’t they already? Why are people more scared of sharks than driving? People are not rational, and generally not as well informed about vaccination risks as we are, and are generally terrible at evaluating risk to boot. Withdrawing compensation for unpreventable vaccine injuries would look highly suspicious to anyone not well informed on the matter. Given the enormous benefit of vaccines to society, some costs are worth incurring in order to ensure their use.
You have a point in that I do not have any evidence that this would effect uptake rates, that’s for more well informed people to decide. I’m saying that even if the vaccine court is not morally necessary, it may be pragmatically necessary.
I looked at the odious Atism One website and saw reference to two anti-vax luminaries, “Mary Holland, Esq. & Collyn Peddie, Esq”
Esquire?
Esquire means “Squire”, a male member of the English gentry ranking just below a knight (who would be called “Sir”). These two people are both women, and presumably not part of the English gentry.
Or does this word mean something different in the USA?
http://www.autismone.org/content/mary-holland-esq-collyn-peddie-esq-federal-pre-emption-and-vaccine-act
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Ah, Wikepedia: “In the United States, this style is most common among attorneys, borrowing from the English tradition whereby all barristers were styled “Esquires”.”
Both women are attorneys. Thanks, carry on.
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