Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and director of the Vaccine Schooling Heart at Youngsters’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for years has sparred with Kennedy over vaccines. Offit fears that Kennedy will use flawed research to justify including autism and different frequent medical issues to the damage desk, regardless of how a lot they battle with sturdy scientific analysis.

“You are able to do that, and you’ll bankrupt the program,” he mentioned. “These are methods to finish vaccine manufacturing on this nation.”

If the belief fund had been to run out of cash, Congress would have to act, mentioned Dorit Reiss, a legislation professor at College of California Regulation San Francisco who has studied the Vaccine Damage Compensation Program. Congress might improve the excise tax on vaccines, she mentioned, or go a legislation limiting what’s on the damage desk. Or Congress might abolish the program, and the vaccine makers would discover themselves again within the state of affairs they confronted within the Eighties.

“That’s not unrealistic,” Reiss mentioned.

Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, final 12 months proposed the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which might have allowed individuals to bypass the no-fault system and head straight to civil court docket. His press launch for the invoice—written in September, earlier than Kennedy’s ascension to HHS secretary—quoted Kennedy saying, “If we wish protected and efficient vaccines, we’d like to finish the legal responsibility defend.”

The laws by no means got here up for a vote. A spokesperson for the congressman mentioned he expects to introduce it once more “within the very close to future.”

Renée Gentry, director of the George Washington College Regulation Faculty’s Vaccine Damage Litigation Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely Congress will blow up the no-fault program. However Gentry, who represents individuals submitting claims for accidents, mentioned it’s arduous to predict what Congress, confronted with a doomsday situation, would do.

“Usually Democrats are buddies of plaintiffs’ attorneys,” she mentioned. “However speaking about vaccines on the Hill is like strolling on a razor blade that’s on hearth.”