The Supreme Court rules on Bruesewitz v. Wyeth and vaccine injury cases
Hard as it is to believe, it’s been nearly a year since I first learned that the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case regarding the legitimacy of the vaccine court. The long version can be found here, but the short version is that last March SCOTUS agreed to hear a case regarding the constitutionality of the law that set up the Vaccine Court back in the 1980s. As you might recall, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was passed in 1986 in order to establish a no-fault compensation system for children who suffer vaccine injury. The NCVIA was necessary because a flood of lawsuits in the wake of a muck-raking, sensationalistic, and, in retrospect, totally inaccurate TV special, Vaccine Roulette, had fired up a fear mongering campaign about the DTP (diptheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine to the point where there was a very real danger of pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. giving up on vaccines altogether. The liability had become just too high. Several large jury awards convinced pharmaceutical companies that the risk of producing vaccines was just too high relative to the potential profit.