Are We Headed Back to the Bad Old Days of Vaccination Lawsuits?
On Oct. 12, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, a case concerning an infant who tragically exhibited seizures and mental disabilities shortly after receiving a whooping-cough vaccine manufactured by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (now part of Pfizer). The case has huge implications both for the future of the vaccine industry and public health.
Vaccines have saved more lives than any other drug or device in the history of modern science. But in rare cases, vaccinating infants can still cause serious or even life-threatening adverse effects. It’s vital that we encourage parents to continue vaccinating children, and it’s just and proper to compensate families who suffer in these cases.
But America’s liability system has already proved itself ill-equipped to deal with such events. After a 1974 British study suggested dangers stemming from the whooping-cough vaccine, U.S. personal-injury lawyers filed a wave of lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. In 1985, such lawsuits sought over $3 billion in damages. Vaccine manufacturers understandably started pulling out of the market, and the price for the whooping-cough vaccine shot up 10,000 percent.
Full article on vaccination lawsuits.
What makes vaccines possible is a no fault procedure for compensating unfortunate victims. We need to keep the lawyers out of it.
Parents automatically look for a scapegoat when misfortune visits one of their children. I watched a documentary on the polio vaccine. Because the fear of polio was so great in the first half of the 20th century, parents were lining up to have their kids participate in what was then a risky, experimental polio vaccine (basically injecting kids with a dead polio virus). In the age of excessive litigation, a polio vaccine would not have been developed or would have taken decades longer to develop due to worries about kids being inadvertently infected with polio rather than immunized.
I can’t think of anything positive about mixing trial lawyers and medicine. How about a complete separation.