The seeds of a court case that has lasted for more than 20 years were planted in February 2001, when the parents of 11-month-old Yates Hazlehurst took him to the doctor for a routine measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Soon after, his family would allege in a court hearing, Yates became “wild,” “very hyperactive,” and “out of control.”
“By the summer of 2001,” a US federal appeals court judge would later write, “Yates had lost all meaningful speech, even though he had previously used words such as ‘mama,’ ‘please,’ and ‘thank you.’ At about the same time, he developed chronic diarrhea and abdominal pain. Following a series of evaluations in July 2002, Yates was diagnosed as exhibiting a pattern of behavior consistent with autism.”
In 2003, the Hazlehurst family filed a claim with the Office of Special Masters of the US Court of Federal Claims. The office is part of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which was established in the 1980s by Congress to compensate people who are able to prove a likely vaccine injury. The money comes from a fund of billions of dollars accumulated from a small excise tax applied to most childhood vaccines.
From 2006 to 2023, about 70 percent of those who brought cases were awarded money without going to trial. Given the safety of vaccines, in the majority of those cases, the government did not conclude that a vaccine was responsible for the alleged injury. Instead, as the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, which keeps data about vaccine injury claims, explains, the government might settle based on precedent or “to minimize the time and expense of litigating a case.”
More challenging cases are evaluated not by a jury or a trial judge, but in a separate courtroom presided over by special masters, judicial appointees who have extensive knowledge in vaccine injury cases.
In Yates’ case, one of his attorneys was his father. Rolf Hazlehurst, currently an assistant district attorney in Tennessee, became focused on vaccine injuries after his son’s diagnosis. Beginning in 2019, he worked for six years as a senior staff attorney at Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chaired before going on leave to launch his presidential bid in 2023. Like many other parents of autistic children, Rolf and his wife, Angela, had become convinced that the MMR vaccine had caused Yates’ condition, a theory that, despite having been repeatedly and conclusively disproved, remains a perennial claim in the anti-vaccine world.
Eventually, the Hazlehursts’ case would become part of the Omnibus Autism Proceedings, where a slate of vaccine court special masters carefully considered three theories about how vaccines might cause autism, using six test cases, including the Hazlehursts’. In 2009 and 2010, the special masters handed down several decisions, concluding the vaccines could not be credibly linked to any of the children’s autism diagnoses.
Yet even as their petition for compensation was denied, the litigation involving Yates has persisted for 22 years and counting. After appeals failed, the Hazlehursts continued pursuing the case in civil court and added allegations of foul play to their complaint. Among other things, Rolf Hazlehurst has claimed that the Department of Health and Human Services, the defendant in vaccine court cases, “took advantage” of what he scornfully described as the “so-called vaccine court,” where, he said, “the rules of evidence, discovery, and civil procedure mechanisms available in a regular court do not apply.” Hazlehurst has repeatedly alleged a “shocking coverup,” claiming that lawyers for HHS had concealed evidence showing vaccines cause autism during the omnibus hearings. In October, Hazlehurst returned to civil court to argue that he should be able to reopen his vaccine court case. The judge denied his request, but the CEO of Children’s Health Defense has said Hazlehurst is “evaluating next steps” to pursue his goal of bringing the case to court. If he succeeds, the omnibus cases could be reopened, and potentially 5,000 plaintiffs could be allowed to have their cases reheard.
Almost 50 years ago, a similar courthouse crush had prompted Congress to set up the specialized vaccine court to ensure lifesaving shots taken by millions would always be available despite any legal liabilities. Its success is why HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the broader anti-vaccine movement have moved to kill it off.
“If you can’t win in the vaccine court, you probably can’t win anywhere.”
In the anti-vaccine universe, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that they believe failed Yates is one of the ultimate enemies—and Kennedy’s longtime allies believe the time is finally ripe to achieve their moonshot goal: abolishing or weakening it. Kennedy himself wrote the foreword to a book about the evils of the vaccine court system, and Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy officially resigned from in December, has made no secret of its hope that he will quash the vaccine court for good. “For years, he has argued that shielding vaccine manufacturers from liability removes any meaningful incentive to ensure product safety,” an April CHD post read. “If there is any hope of undoing this decades-old mistake, it may rest in his hands.”
Their dreams may be quietly becoming reality. In late June, Kennedy made a little-noticed comment boasting that his agency had “just brought a guy in this week who is going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.” In June, HHS had awarded $150,000 to an Arizona law firm, Brueckner Spitler Shelts, for what federal contracting records describe as “National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) expertise.” One of the firm’s attorneys, Drew Downing, has years of experience representing petitioners in vaccine court; it did not respond to a request for comment.
“Secretary Kennedy is committed to restoring scientific integrity, transparency, and public trust in federal health policy, especially where it concerns vaccines,” Emily G. Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, wrote in response to questions. “Any suggestion that his goal is to ‘make vaccines harder to access’ or ‘discourage manufacturers’ is completely false.”
As secretary of the nation’s most powerful health agency, with oversight of everything from the FDA to the CDC and the NIH, Kennedy has been able to turn his long history of attacks on vaccinations into government policy. He has stacked HHS leadership with critics of both vaccine and basic public health policy, including contrarian physician friends who first gained notoriety opposing Covid vaccines. There’s Dr. Vinay Prasad, a former University of California, San Francisco, hematologist-oncologist who has regularly opposed the FDA’s recommendations to get Covid boosters, who in May was named the agency’s top vaccine regulator. Dr. Marty Makary, a pancreatic surgeon at Johns Hopkins University who now leads the FDA, has made a career opposing mainstream medical knowledge, especially on vaccine guidance, including questioning the efficacy of Covid booster shots and what he called “booster mandates,” meaning requirements by some institutions and workplaces to get vaccinated during the height of the pandemic. Former Stanford University health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who has downplayed the success of the Covid vaccines and argued that the virus should have been left to run rampant, now heads the NIH. Kennedy also tapped David Geier, a vaccine critic who was disciplined by the Maryland medical board for practicing without a license, to rehash the settled science of a purported link between vaccines and autism.
In late April, the Washington Post reported that Kennedy planned for all new vaccines, including updated Covid shots, to be tested against a placebo—an ethically and scientifically questionable mandate that could hamstring approvals. In May, the FDA suggested it would now recommend regular Covid vaccines only to people 65 and older and those 6 months or older who have at least one risk factor for serious illness. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Geier was “hunting for proof” in the federal Vaccine Safety Datalink database to find a basis for his claims that the CDC hid evidence that vaccines cause autism. Both Geier and his father, Mark, were banned from accessing the VSD in 2004 “after CDC officials determined they had misrepresented what they were going to do with the data.” They were banned again in 2006, but today, David Geier works for HHS as a “senior data analyst,” according to an agency directory.
One of Kennedy’s most shocking moves came on June 9, when he executed what critics saw as an administrative coup by removing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an expert body that issues recommendations on vaccines to the CDC. While all of the ousted ACIP members warned in an editorial that the US vaccine infrastructure had been left “critically weakened,” an HHS press release called the removals “a bold step in restoring public trust” and quoted Kennedy hailing them as a way to promote “unbiased science—evaluated through a transparent process and insulated from conflicts of interest,” irrespective of a “specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda.”
Kennedy will “do everything possible to destroy the vaccine infrastructure.”
But Kennedy went on to stack the committee with his friends from the anti-vaccine world, including Dr. Robert Malone, who claims to have invented mRNA vaccines—an oversimplification, according to other researchers who helped develop the technology—and has gone on to question their safety, as well as Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse who’s served on the board of the anti-vaccine National Vaccine Information Center. Also appointed was Martin Kulldorff, a dismissed Harvard University researcher and Covid lockdown opponent who Reuters reported has earned substantial sums as an expert witness in lawsuits against Merck’s HPV Gardasil vaccine.
The CDC—for now—recommends Gardasil, which protects against the virus that causes cervical cancer, to people under 26, citing numerous safety studies and noting that the most common side effect is pain, swelling, and redness at the injection site. But Kennedy has a close relationship with Wisner Baum, a Los Angeles law firm that is representing a large number of Gardasil plaintiffs who allege a laundry list of injuries from getting the shot, ranging from seizures and fibromyalgia to diabetes and arthritis. Kennedy served as co-counsel on the firm’s Gardasil cases before stepping aside to serve as HHS secretary.
Upon joining the Trump administration, Kennedy disclosed that he was entitled to “10% of fees awarded” in cases he referred to Wisner Baum. He has received roughly $2.5 million in referral fees since 2022. The firm says they were unrelated to vaccine litigation, but instead to lawsuits brought by wildfire victims and suits regarding the weed killer Roundup. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he’d give any Gardasil fees to one of his sons. Michael Baum, a partner at the firm, told Mother Jones that Kennedy “will not be receiving any fees arising from the Gardasil cases.” (Kennedy’s son Conor is also an attorney at Wisner Baum, but does not work on Gardasil litigation.)
As head of HHS, Kennedy is poised to attack vaccines from both the supply and demand sides. If he is successful, vaccines will, at the least, become more expensive and difficult for people to get—and, given the increasing likelihood of costly litigation, drug manufacturers may be reluctant to make them at all.
“Unfortunately, it’s pretty much going exactly how we would’ve expected,” says Laurel Bristow, an infectious disease researcher who also hosts Health Wanted, a podcast produced by Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “When he got confirmed, people were really worried that he would just do an outright ban. But he is smarter than that and knows the ways in which he can inhibit people’s ability to access vaccines.”
Kennedy raised the stakes considerably when he promised that, by September, HHS will discover the causes of autism, a ludicrous timeline that the Autism Society of America has called “harmful, misleading, and unrealistic.” In April, Kennedy said the United States would undertake a “massive testing and research effort” to achieve this goal, adding that, “by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic, and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.”
His use of the word “exposure” is telling; Kennedy has persistently claimed that autism is caused not by a complex constellation of forces, including genetics, as most experts believe, but by environmental exposures, including vaccines.
Shortly after, Kennedy tried to revise the goal, saying he expected “some” of the answers by September. But to public health experts, it still seems like nothing more than a pretext to justify whatever vaccine-related havoc Kennedy already has in mind. “He’ll say, ‘I’ve looked behind the curtain at CDC and FDA and found something disturbing,’” predicts Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, who previously served as an ACIP member from 1998-2003.
Namely, Offit and other experts expect that in September, Kennedy will present some data that he claims proves vaccines somehow cause autism. Armed with that preordained conclusion, Kennedy will “do everything possible to destroy the vaccine infrastructure,” adds Offit, who served as an ACIP member from 1998 to 2003. And one relatively obscure but important part of that infrastructure is the federal vaccine court.
Immunizations are overwhelmingly safe and effective. While vaccine injuries do happen, all available evidence shows they are extremely rare. For most vaccines, the likelihood that someone will have a serious complication like anaphylaxis is lower than giving birth to triplets naturally, being struck by lightning, or being born with an extra finger or toe.
In the early and mid-1980s, however, a string of civil lawsuits were brought by families that alleged their children had been injured by diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus shots. “Even though most public health officials believed that the claims of side effects were unfounded,” according to a New England Journal of Medicine article about vaccine court, “some families won substantial awards from sympathetic juries who were convinced otherwise.” While just one DPT injury lawsuit was filed in 1978, by 1984, there were 73, as the amounts of money being demanded skyrocketed, from about $10 million to more than $46 million.
“The vaccine court was largely started as a result of a marriage of parties who didn’t like or trust one another, who married for the sake of the child.”
In response, drug companies began to shy away from producing vaccines, creating a serious risk they would no longer be available. The fear came extremely close to reality: By December 1984, the number of vaccine makers had dwindled. Just one still made DPT shots; it was eventually phased out altogether.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 was meant as a compromise among families, drug manufacturers, public health officials, and the federal government to ensure that vaccine-injured people could be compensated without endangering the vaccine supply. When the VICP launched two years later, a key aspect of the program was the use of special masters, who are appointed by the US Court of Federal Claims to four-year terms to hear only vaccine injury cases.
“Let me put it this way: The vaccine court was largely started as a result of a marriage of parties who didn’t like or trust one another, who married for the sake of the child,” says Colonel Denise K. Vowell, who was appointed as a special master in 2006.
“The idea behind creating the Office of Special Masters in the first place was to create a cadre of people who’d acquired experience in handling these cases,” adds Vowell, who, in her previous work as a senior Army attorney, had handled medical malpractice and toxic tort suits. “I joked for a while after doing the autism cases that I think I could teach a graduate-level seminar on mercury toxicology. I read over 1,000 medical journal articles preparing for the [omnibus proceedings].”
Today, most vaccines are covered by the program, with some exceptions, including ones for Covid. Vaccine manufacturers can be sued in civil court only after a claim has gone through the vaccine court system. That system is designed to serve the petitioners claiming injury, Vowell says; vaccine court has more lenient rules of evidence and allows them to make arguments and produce experts who wouldn’t necessarily be allowed in civil court. “If you can’t win in the vaccine court, you probably can’t win anywhere,” she says.
The court has its issues, says Renée Gentry, who directs the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at George Washington University Law and has represented litigants for more than 20 years. The caps on compensation are too low, she says, and the system is “stretched to its limits” over a lack of special masters. “You’re waiting two years for a trial right now. There’s eight special masters and 3,500 cases.”
But despite her criticisms, Gentry acknowledges the court as “the best alternative.” While abolishing the vaccine court would be difficult, she says Kennedy has lots of ways to sabotage the program: “You can gut it from the inside and let it crash on its own, or let it wither and die.” For example, petitioners at the court are supposed to get a decision on their claim in 240 days. If they don’t, the special master can allow them to sue in civil court. HHS, technically the defendant in all the court’s cases, could make it a practice under Kennedy to stop responding to claims altogether, even as claims continue to roll in. If the cases simply sit, Gentry says, “people will stop filing.”
If the CDC stops recommending a vaccine, Gentry adds, “that could remove them from our program,” meaning people who got that shot could no longer be able to apply for VICP compensation and would have to proceed to civil litigation right away.
Conversely, Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s law school who specializes in vaccine law and policy, notes that Kennedy could sabotage the court by adding unscientifically supported injuries—including autism—to the list that entitles families to compensation. “If he comes up with something that allows him to make the HHS’s official position that vaccines cause autism,” Reiss says, “he’d have better grounds for doing that.”
The consequences of doing so would be catastrophic, Offit warns. “Just add something that affects 1 in 31 children and you’ll break the program,” he says.
A similar body blow could come from concocting a link between aluminum adjuvants—an ingredient that boosts immunizations’ effectiveness—and a host of health problems.
The element has become another Kennedy obsession. In 2021, Kennedy served as an attorney in a suit against Merck, claiming that the aluminum adjuvant in its Gardasil vaccines had caused “serious and debilitating injuries.” He has also blamed it for rising rates of anxiety and depression, asthma, and food allergies. “You wonder why all the Claritin is being sold and all these kids have allergies today,” he said at an event earlier this year. “It comes from the aluminum in the vaccine.” (Claritin, an antihistamine, is primarily used for seasonal allergies.)
A key ally in Kennedy’s crusade against aluminum is Aaron Siri, a lawyer who has worked extensively on Kennedy’s behalf, as well as for the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network. In 2021, Siri accused the FDA of not ensuring that 13 vaccines met approved levels of aluminum and petitioned the agency to stop distributing the shots, including those that prevent catastrophic diseases like polio and tetanus.
The agency has not complied with Siri’s request—likely because of the vast body of research affirming the element’s safety and use as an additive to strengthen the body’s immune response to a vaccine.
A judge ruled in March that the bellwether plaintiffs in the Gardasil cases hadn’t proved a link between the aluminum in the vaccine and their health conditions, but that likely won’t be the last we hear of Kennedy’s fixation on aluminum, says Offit, who expects to see bad science targeting the element. “He’s going to say, ‘See? Aluminum adjuvants cause autism,’ and then he’s going to try and attack the vaccine compensation program.”
Vaccines are widely considered the greatest breakthrough in public health history: They prevent millions of deaths each year, save billions in health care costs, and have played a major role in extending lifespans by decades. So why would Kennedy want to undermine them? The answer lies in knowing that Kennedy’s skepticism extends beyond immunizations. Despite more than a century of research and indisputable health outcomes, he simply rejects most of what is understood about germ theory.
In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy promotes the principles of the “miasma theory,” an ancient and now-discredited hypothesis asserting that all disease is caused by dirty air. Scholars attribute miasma theory to writings by Hippocrates from around the fifth century BCE. It lingered until the late 19th century, when German doctor Robert Koch proved Louis Pasteur’s suspicion that microscopic organisms are the true culprits in contagions. Koch deliberately infected a mouse with anthrax by injecting blood from a sickened sheep. The mouse died.
Koch’s definitive disproving of miasma theory has been replicated millions of times in labs and in families every time a parent gets sick from a school-age kid. But Kennedy is unconvinced. His take on the miasma theory, he explains in his book, is that people can reliably stave off sickness “by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses.” In the ideal environment, he writes, the immune system is always strong enough to fight off illness. “When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition,” he approvingly writes. “Germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus.”
“I’m not accusing Secretary Kennedy of being indifferent to the suffering of children with vaccine-preventable illnesses, but if he gets what he asks for, I hope he lives to regret it.”
Given that line of reasoning, Kennedy’s response to the recent measles outbreak—which sickened more than 1,300 people and killed three by mid-July 2025—makes sense. “It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” he told Fox Nation in March, suggesting that a child victim might have been malnourished because of the lack of access to healthy food in her West Texas community. Meanwhile, the Texas Department of State Health Services confirmed the child “was not vaccinated” and had no “known underlying conditions.”
Kennedy made the same kinds of arguments in the wake of a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people. In a letter to Samoa’s prime minister, he claimed that children are “biologically evolved to handle measles” and argued that before the advent of the measles vaccine, few infants died of the disease. Why? Because they acquired natural immunity from mothers who had been previously infected with the virus. “In contrast, mothers vaccinated with a defective Merck vaccine provide inadequate passive immunity to their babies,” he concluded.
That statement is patently false. To the contrary, before there was a vaccine, measles would kill 2.6 million people worldwide every year, many of whom were likely children under 5. But for miasma believers like Kennedy, those deaths can be brushed away as artifacts of poor sanitation and inadequate nutrition that weaken the otherwise all-powerful immune system. It is vaccines, the miasma crowd argues, that actually undermine the body’s natural defenses against viruses.
Against the backdrop of this belief, Kennedy’s malign plan to undermine the country’s vaccine infrastructure comes into sharper focus. As his tenure as HHS secretary continues, the experts we spoke with believe that abolishing or weakening the federal vaccine injury program is likely one of his ultimate goals—and would be a huge mistake. If the vaccine injury compensation program is opened to include children with autism or asthma, it could overload the system meant to compensate people with legitimate, scientifically supported vaccine injuries. If litigants could sue drug companies in civil court without going through the VICP’s special masters first, it could create a mass of lawsuits, frightening drug manufacturers out of making vaccines at all, as nearly happened in the 1980s.
Offit points out that there’s even more precedent for this than just the DPT lawsuits; LYMErix, a vaccine for Lyme disease, was pulled off the market in 2002 after just three years. That happened in part because, following only a weak endorsement from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, it wasn’t covered by the VICP. Some patients began reporting alleged autoimmune side effects from the vaccine and sued its manufacturer in civil court, and the producer discontinued the drug. The manufacturer spent $1 million in legal fees, but the alleged autoimmune effects were never conclusively proved, and an FDA analysis did not find any evidence of a causal link between the vaccines and the symptoms. “Litigation drove it off the market,” Offit says.
Kennedy’s crusade will create even more doubt over vaccines’ effectiveness, as he uses his position to broadcast and legitimize debunked ideas about their risks. In the end, experts warn, it will be patients who suffer.
“When you start a fire, there are unintended consequences,” cautions Vowell, who retired as the court’s chief special master after nearly a decade of cases. “We’d be reaping those unintended consequences. I’m not accusing Secretary Kennedy of being indifferent to the suffering of children with vaccine-preventable illnesses, but if he gets what he asks for, I hope he lives to regret it.”