Who Pays for VICP?

There is a lot of misinformation out there about vaccines and, well, pretty much anything related to them. People like myself that take a science-based approach to vaccines to counter myths are "pharma shills" (we're not). Manufacturers have absolutely no liability (they can be sued for some liability claims). If vaccines work, it doesn't matter whether my kid is vaccinated or not (it does matter), or the variation, why do so many outbreaks include the vaccinated (it's a numbers game; see previous link). The government is scared to do a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of the vaccine schedule (such a study would be unethical and possible illegal). VAERS is a reliable source for drawing conclusions (it's unreliable for conclusions, but can be a springboard for research ideas).

And then there's something that came up yesterday in a CDC twitter chat about vaccines. The chat (#CDCvax) was crashed by a bunch of anti-vaccine activists spouting all kinds of nonsense, including all of the myths mentioned above. One other claim popped up that I have not written about before. It involves the funding of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). Basically, one anti-vaccine proponent made the oft-repeated, but never correct, claim that taxpayers fund the VICP compensation fund. Here's one example of this claim:

Here's a clue, they aren't.

The short response is: Taxpayers do not pay for vaccine court payouts. But I'll go into a bit more detail.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

There is a certain lie that floats about anti-vaccine groups. Before I go on, let me be clear about my use of that word: "lie". Because of certain, um, frivolous proclivities among some of the folks who perpetuate this lie, I feel it behooves me to define just what I mean. In this post, I am going to use the term "lie" with it's definition of "a falsehood". It should not be construed, unless I explicitly state otherwise, that I am implying an intention to deceive on the part of the person uttering this lie. Suffice to say that, whether through deliberate action or mere misunderstanding, many among the anti-vaccine movement persist in forwarding this lie, this falsehood, as if it were truth.

Now what lie am I going on about? This: "the Supreme Court of the United States has completely shielded vaccine manufacturers from product liability". You've no doubt heard some version of this before, often in the form "parents can't sue vaccine manufacturers". As it is frequently stated by those opposed to vaccinations, this simply is not true. Some parents just repeat this because they read it somewhere and believed it. They haven't actually read the relevant documents to find out for themselves what's really going on. I don't blame them for that. It's sloppy thinking and intellectually lazy, but I'm not going to harp on it. I'd just recommend that they (temporarily) put aside their blinders, read the actual source documents and think for themselves. Don't even take my word for it.

Then there are those who ought to know better, and, I suspect, probably do. Whether they just really do not understand or are knowingly misrepresenting facts, there are those who hold themselves out as fierce advocates of informed consent who, if they were truly devoted to that, would actually present truth, rather than falsehood. People like Barbara Loe Fisher.