Federal law requires HHS to send bi-annual reports to Congress detailing how it has made childhood vaccines safer. Yet, HHS has never filed a single report. ICAN’s attorneys have called HHS out on this multiple times, but it continues to shamelessly flout the law.
Lead Counsel, Aaron Siri, Esq. lays out the details here:
When Congress eliminated pharmaceutical companies’ liability for vaccines in 1986, it recognized that it eliminated the fear of losing money that drives companies to assure the safety of their products. Congress, therefore, made the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the parent department of the CDC and FDA, responsible for vaccine safety.
To assure HHS is actually performing this critical duty of assuring the safety of products injected into babies, the same 1986 law that eliminated pharmaceutical company liability also created a “task force” on safer childhood vaccines. This task force, made up of the heads of the NIH, FDA, and CDC, was supposed to make recommendations to the Secretary of HHS on how to make vaccines safer. And, as noted above, the law also required the Secretary of HHS to file a report with Congress every two years detailing its efforts to improve vaccine safety.
As many of you know, ICAN previously sued HHS for failing to file these reports with Congress and it admitted in 2018 that it never once filed a single required report with Congress. It also admitted that the task force had been disbanded in 1998!
After publicly shaming them for this misconduct, including in the Vaccine Safety Debate we had with HHS, you would think HHS would start filing bi-annual reports and the task force would start making recommendations. Sadly, our attorneys have confirmed neither has happened.
In response to ICAN checking in again in January 2023, HHS admitted that there are no still reports. Not one.
While HHS has a $2.95 trillion budget, it apparently doesn’t care about safer childhood vaccines—and never has. ICAN will continue to monitor the situation and share any important updates.
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See below for more instances where ICAN has confronted health agencies over vaccine safety:
