What Kennedy’s Critics Don’t Want You to Know About Vaccines, Liability, and Conflicted Science

Whenever Secretary Kennedy raises questions about vaccines, liability, or safety science, his critics rush to brand him reckless, irresponsible, or even “anti-humanity.” Yet when one examines his record carefully—statutes passed by Congress, binding decisions of the Supreme Court, government audits, dashboards maintained by federal agencies, and peer-reviewed studies on how vaccine safety is actually measured—a very different picture emerges. Kennedy’s insistence on exposing liability risks, calling out conflicts of interest, and challenging distorted safety claims is not reckless at all. It is consistent with the evidence.

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), often held up as a “generous” system for families, was never designed to function that way. Congress created it in 1986 through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act at a moment when manufacturers were threatening to exit the market due to lawsuits. The program channels claims into a special tribunal within the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Petitioners must either fit into a very narrow Vaccine Injury Table or succeed under what is known as the Althen test, which requires a plausible medical theory, a logical chain of cause and effect, and a temporal relationship that makes sense biologically.

Families have to litigate these requirements against the Department of Justice with expert witnesses, in what are often long and adversarial proceedings. The Supreme Court confirmed the restrictive nature of this system in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, holding that design-defect lawsuits are completely barred. That means families cannot even argue that a vaccine could have been made safer in its design. The oft-repeated claim that VICP is a low-bar, family-friendly program collapses under the law’s own text and precedent.

The same gap between rhetoric and reality applies to COVID-19 vaccines. Critics will sometimes say families have nothing to worry about because they are covered by the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, or CICP, under the PREP Act. But the PREP Act provides sweeping immunity for “covered persons” administering “covered countermeasures,” with only the narrowest exception for willful misconduct.

CICP is not comparable to VICP. It imposes a one-year filing deadline, bars discovery and hearings, provides no judicial review, and excludes damages for pain and suffering. It also does not cover attorneys’ fees, and death or wage-loss benefits are capped. The program has processed tens of thousands of COVID-19 claims and compensated virtually none.

Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) own dashboard, as of June 2025, reported 14,413 COVID-19 claims filed, 115 deemed eligible, and 69 compensated. That is a compensation rate of 0.48 percent. The Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service confirm this truth in their reports: CICP is opaque, narrow, and overwhelmingly denies claims.

The role of advisory committees has also been badly misrepresented. Kennedy has been accused of undermining liability protections by reshaping the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). But ACIP is not the source of liability protection. It is an advisory body, nothing more. Liability coverage through VICP requires two things: first, that the CDC recommends the vaccine for routine use in children or pregnant women; and second, that Congress imposes an excise tax on that vaccine. Only when both of these conditions are met can the Department of Health and Human Services amend the Vaccine Injury Table by rulemaking under . That rulemaking process requires publication in the Federal Register and notice-and-comment, not just the stroke of a committee pen. This is why COVID-19 vaccines are not covered by VICP: Congress never enacted the excise tax. Kennedy’s decision to restructure ACIP did not alter liability protections; it simply addressed what GAO and the Institute of Medicine had already documented—persistent conflicts of interest among ACIP members.

The question of conflicts leads to another distortion. Critics sometimes claim that conflicts of interest in vaccine advisory committees are at “record lows,” and therefore Kennedy’s concerns are misplaced. But disclosures on forms are not the same as absence of influence. The peer-reviewed literature is unequivocal. A Cochrane review by Lundh and colleagues in 2017 found that industry-funded studies are far more likely to report favorable results and conclusions than independently funded ones. A classic BMJ review by Lexchin and colleagues in 2003 documented sponsorship bias as systemic across medicine. Industry money influences what questions get asked, how data are analyzed, how results are written up, and what gets published. Pretending that lower self-reported conflicts mean the problem has disappeared ignores this evidence. Kennedy is correct to say the influence of industry is still corrosive.

Another repeated talking point is that Kennedy’s policies will cause the return of rare pediatric diseases and that he will be responsible for “mass deaths.” That is not epidemiology—it is political rhetoric. Public health science does not assign deaths to individuals by fiat. Establishing causation requires denominators, incidence rates, trends in sanitation, nutrition, natural immunity, and rigorous counterfactual models. Without these, predictions of “roaring comebacks” are speculation, not science. As Greenland & Robins argued in Epidemiology (1986), and Hernán & Robins explained in Causal Inference (2020), causal claims require structured counterfactual reasoning. Kennedy is right to reject the slanderous conflation of dissent with homicide.

Finally, the scientific literature itself shows that vaccine safety has been consistently overstated by biased designs. Consider how the CDC’s own flagship Vaccine Effectiveness reports define someone as “vaccinated” only seven days after their dose, discarding outcomes in the early period when risks are often highest. That is classic immortal-time or case-window bias. Or take myocarditis detection in the Vaccine Safety Datalink: Sharff et al.showed that algorithms which omitted the ICD-10 code I51.4 and excluded outpatient encounters missed many true cases; when chart review was applied, the incidence nearly doubled. Alessandria et al. demonstrated that correcting immortal time in COVID cohort studies radically altered mortality risk estimates—sometimes reversing them. Jackson & Nelson and Lipsitch et al. spelled out the fragile assumptions behind test-negative designs, which can bias results when care-seeking or testing behaviors differ by vaccination status. These are not obscure issues—they are mainstream methodological warnings in the peer-reviewed literature.

Kennedy is therefore right to argue that the architecture of vaccine-safety studies has tilted toward under-detection of harms and overstatement of benefits. By excluding early-risk periods, omitting key diagnostic codes, failing to apply negative-control outcomes, and ignoring structural biases like healthy-user effects and testing asymmetries, agencies have painted a misleading picture of safety.

Put together, the distortions Kennedy’s critics rely on form a pattern. They portray VICP as generous when statutes and precedent prove it is restrictive. They present CICP as a remedy when its compensation rate is effectively zero. They treat ACIP as a liability switch when in law it is advisory only. They dismiss conflicts of interest despite decades of literature on sponsorship bias. They attribute hypothetical epidemics to one policymaker without causal modeling. And they ignore well-documented methodological flaws that inflate vaccine safety.

Kennedy is not destabilizing public health. He is clarifying the legal architecture, exposing weak remedies, spotlighting industry influence, and demanding methodological rigor. His critics defend a playbook that casts him as a dangerous crazy person. Kennedy defends transparency, law, and science. That is why he is also right about vaccines, liability, and the distorted science that has concealed more than it has revealed.

Takeaways:

• The architecture of vaccine safety adjudication is under renewed scrutiny, as documented evidence reveals systemic bias, selective outcome reporting, and study design manipulation that consistently minimizes risk.
• Kennedy demonstrates the disruptive clarity that results when a public health official prioritizes law, evidence, and ethical transparency over bureaucratic complicity.

Dr. James Lyons-Weiler is a research scientist and prolific author with over 55 peer-reviewed studies and three books to his name: Ebola: An Evolving Story, Cures vs. Profits, and The Environmental and Genetic Causes of Autism. He is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK) and Strategic Director of Policy Integration and Research Realignment at MAHA Institute.