Why Kennedy Sued the Government Over Vaccine Safety & Won

In recent news, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sued the United States government and won in an issue regarding vaccine safety. According to a legal document entitled, "Mandate for Safer Childhood Vaccines," Health and Human Services (HHS) has openly admitted to not having filed any vaccine safety reports in over 30 years. 

In May 2017, ICAN Founder, Del Bigtree, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.. as well as other parties concerned about vaccine safety were selected by the White House to conduct a meeting with the Counselor to the Secretary of HHS, the heads of the National Institute of Health, NIH, the Center for Disease Control, CDC, and Food and the Drug Administration, FDA. Del Bigtree and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspected that HHS was not fulfilling its critical vaccine safety obligations as required by Congress in The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.

"The 1986 Act granted unprecedented, economic immunity to pharmaceutical companies for injuries caused by their products and eviscerated economic incentive for them to manufacture safe vaccine products or improve the safety of existing vaccine products. Congress therefore charged the Secretary of HHS with the explicit responsibility to assure vaccine safety.

Hence, since 1986, HHS has had the primary and virtually sole responsibility to make and assure improvements in the licensing, manufacturing, adverse reaction reporting, research, safety and efficacy testing of vaccines in order to reduce the risk of adverse vaccine reactions. In order to assure HHS meets its vaccine safety obligations, Congress required as part of the 1986 Act that the Secretary of HHS submit a biennial reports to Congress detailing the improvements in vaccine safety made by HHS in the preceding two years."

In an effort to gain access to these safety reports, ICAN filed a Freedom of Information Act request In August of 2017 to the HHS only to be blocked from receiving information for over eight months. Do to this delay, ICAN and Kennedy were forced to bring a lawsuit against HHS to provide copies of these reports to Congress or to admit that they never actually filed these reports.

"The result of the lawsuit is that HHS had to finally and shockingly admit that it never, not even once, submitted a single biennial report to Congress detailing the improvements in vaccine safety. This speaks volumes to the seriousness by which vaccine safety is treated at HHS and heightens the concern that HHS doesn’t have a clue as to the actual safety profile of the now 29 doses, and growing, of vaccines given by one year of age."