Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is preparing a sweeping federal push on vaccine injuries, including a dedicated research clinic at the National Institutes of Health and a new billing code that would pay doctors to file reports of serious side effects, as The New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports. He discussed the plan during an unannounced NIH visit, where he met patients who believe vaccines injured them.
The NIH previewed the effort in two little-noticed “highlighted topics” notices posted in June, promising a “new vaccine injury research program at the N.I.H. Clinical Center that may expand to centers around the country.”
The timing is awkward. Measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases are climbing as vaccination rates fall, and decades of research show serious side effects are rare. Kennedy has nonetheless promoted a vaccine-autism link that numerous studies have failed to find, and argued, without evidence, that aluminum and mercury in shots are dangerous.
Vaccine experts support continued safety monitoring, but many are wary of Kennedy’s motivations and say it’s impossible to tell whether the initiative will be legitimate science until more details emerge. “More research in vaccine safety would be very helpful,” said Dr. Daniel Salmon, who leads the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It needs to be rigorous science.”
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Dr. Helen Chu, a former member of the CDC vaccine advisory panel Kennedy fired last spring, agreed that serious adverse events deserve closer study “so that we can design safer vaccines in the future.”
Among the patients Kennedy met was Brianne Dressen, who says NIH doctors diagnosed her with “post-vaccine neuropathy” after she joined a 2020 trial of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, since withdrawn from the market. Dressen, who founded the advocacy group React19, welcomed the attention: “This is the first time there’s been anything even remotely official.”
