HHS Turns Its Own Machinery on Vaccine Injuries
Under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the federal health department is undertaking an agency-wide effort to focus on injuries claimed to be related to vaccines, Ars Technica reports. The Department of Health and Human Services laid out four aspects of the large-scale initiative in a press announcement Thursday. The pushing entity matters: this is the department's own machinery being turned toward the question, run under a secretary Ars Technica describes as anti-vaccine.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The first part of that initiative is a new clinic at the National Institutes of Health dedicated to studying and caring for patients experiencing health problems following vaccination, per Ars Technica — and it actually opened October 5, with Kennedy secretly attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony alongside other high-level Trump administration officials.
Another part proposes reimbursing doctors for reporting possible vaccine injuries to VAERS, the CDC-run system. That's the same system Ars Technica notes is a common focus of anti-vaccine advocates, who misuse it: it is designed as an indiscriminate dragnet for any potential safety concern, a sensitive early-warning monitor rather than a curated set of findings.