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| In this Friday, Oct. 24, 2014 photo, Jeffrey McCord, who suffered from violent and unexplained seizures as a baby, demonstrates his guitar at home in St. John, Virgin Islands. A neurologist drew a connection that a dozen other doctors missed: his convulsions began days after a routine vaccination. Jeffrey's mother Martha filed a claim with a congressional program that compensates children like Jeffrey, but it took 11 years for the first check to arrive. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- A system Congress established to speed help to Americans harmed
by vaccines has instead heaped additional suffering on thousands of
families, The Associated Press has found.
The
premise was simple: quickly and generously pay for medical care in the
rare cases when a shot to prevent a sickness such as flu or measles
instead is the likely cause of serious health complications. But the
system is not working as intended.
The AP read
hundreds of decisions, conducted more than 100 interviews, and analyzed
a database of more than 14,500 cases filed in a special vaccine court.
That database was current as of January 2013; the government has refused
to release an updated version since.
Among the findings:
-Private
attorneys have been paid tens of millions of taxpayer dollars even as
they clog the court with more cases than they can handle, some of which
the court rejected as totally inadequate. The court offers a financial
incentive to over-file - unlike typical civil court cases, attorneys are
paid whether or not they win, as was the case with more than 5,000
losing claims that vaccines caused the developmental disability autism.
Those who double-bill for their time or consistently submit questionable
expenses are not disciplined.
-Prominent
attorneys have enlisted expert witnesses whose own work has been widely
discredited, including one who treated autism with a potent drug used to
chemically castrate serial rapists. Another doctor cribbed his material
from an anti-vaccine website. Some of the most prominent experts set up
nonprofits questioning vaccine safety, further fueling public
skepticism. Meanwhile, many doctors hired by the government to defend
vaccine safety in court have ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
-Lawmakers
designed vaccine court to favor payouts, but the government fights
legitimate claims and fails its obligation to publicize the court,
worried that if they concede a vaccine caused harm, the public will
react by skipping shots. The court was created with relaxed standards of
evidence and a burden of proof more easily met than civil lawsuits.
Lawmakers expected some children would get help even though their
injuries weren't truly caused by a vaccine. If government doctors had
their way, though, 1,600 families would not have gotten more than $1.1
billion in cash and future medical care between the court's opening in
1988 and the end of 2012. The government said that while perception of
vaccine safety is important, individual claims are evaluated on
scientific evidence and legal standards.
-Cases
are supposed to be resolved within 240 days, with options for another
150 days of extensions. Less than 7 percent of 7,876 claims not
involving autism met the 240-day target. Add in autism claims, which
were postponed so the court could hear all of them at once, and just 4.5
percent took fewer than 240 days.
Most non-autism cases take at least
two and a half years, with the average case length more than three
years, not including cases unresolved at the end of 2012. Hundreds have
surpassed the decade mark.
Several people died before getting any money.
The
vanquishing of polio, measles and other preventable diseases was the
transcendent public health accomplishment of the 20th century. And yet,
by the mid-1980s, those gains seemed fragile. Pharmaceutical companies
were facing a barrage of lawsuits from parents who believed the
diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis shot had disabled their kids. Their profits
imperiled vaccine makers signaled they would leave the U.S. market.
In
response, Congress gave a break both to pharmaceutical companies and to
those who received a vaccine to prevent one illness, yet suffered
another.
To protect the nation's supply,
lawmakers shielded companies from jury verdicts, shifting liability for
injuries to the U.S. government. That part worked: Vaccines are widely
available, and profitable.
To help people
harmed by shots, Congress created the National Vaccine Injury
Compensation Program. Government doctors and lawyers review claims. If
they believe it is more likely than not that a vaccine - and not
something else - caused the injury, they tap a $3.5 billion fund to pay
for future care and lost wages. That fund is replenished by a 75-cent
tax on each vaccine.
If the government
concludes the vaccination was not likely the cause, it contests the
claim in vaccine court, based several blocks from the White House.
Serious
injuries are extremely uncommon. Though much is in dispute regarding
vaccines and their side effects, the court remains obscure. But largely
due to an influx of adult flu claims, the volume of new cases has
increased, averaging more than 400 annually in recent years.
To
be sure, many of those who received the $2.8 billion that the
government says it has distributed would not have won a civil trial. But
the system has not worked as Congress envisioned.
Many
claims fall into a vast gray area: The science is clear on only nine of
144 vaccine-injury combinations that a shot could - or could not -
cause the illness. Amid this fundamental uncertainty, the kind of
litigation the court was created to avoid is routine.
Caught in the middle are families that need help.
"The
system is not working," said Richard Topping, a former U.S. Department
of Justice attorney who defended the government against vaccine injury
claims but resigned after concluding his bosses had no desire to fix the
major flaws he saw. "People who need help aren't getting it."
