(SRN NEWS/REIUTERS) – Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week launched an agency-wide effort to study and document any health problems reported after vaccination, the Department of Health and Human Services said on Thursday.
The initiative is the latest step by Kennedy, who spent years questioning vaccine safety and founded an anti-vaccine group before taking office, to reshape federal immunization policy.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says childhood vaccines are studied in placebo-controlled and comparison-group trials and monitored for safety after approval.
The federal Vaccine Injury Table lists 14 compensable injuries across 16 vaccine types under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault system in which claimants file against the government, not vaccine makers. Since 1988, it has awarded roughly $5 billion across about 12,300 injury and death claims.
The new moves, which appear to be part of Kennedy’s decades-long efforts to sow skepticism about vaccines, come as he faces legal challenges to his attempts to alter US childhood vaccination schedules and growing concern among public health experts about falling immunization rates, particularly against measles, which has seen a resurgence in the US since last year.
The effort centers on a National Institutes of Health clinic opened on Monday to treat and study patients reporting health problems after receiving vaccines, HHS said in a statement.