New House bill would eliminate liability protections for COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers

Legislation introduced Tuesday in the House would strip pharmaceutical companies of liability protections for COVID-19 vaccines.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas introduced the Let Injured Americans Be Legally Empowered Act with 19 fellow Republicans as co-sponsors.

The bill removes all federal liability protections for the COVID-19 vaccines and preserves the ability of people injured by the vaccine to access pre-existing compensation programs.

Additionally, the legislation is retroactive to ensure the benefits are available to Americans who received the COVID-19 vaccine before the bill is enacted.

COVID-19 vaccines are classified as “countermeasures” under the Public Readiness and Preparedness Act. This allows their manufacturers to be broadly protected from civil liability related to losses stemming from the vaccines.

As a result, vaccine-injured Americans must seek relief under the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, but only 11 COVID-related claims have been paid out of the program.

“The long train of abuses committed by the government and public health establishment in response to COVID-19 will continue to impact the American people for years to come,” Mr. Roy said in a statement.

“Millions of Americans were forced to take a COVID-19 shot out of fear of losing their livelihoods and under false pretenses. Many have faced injury from the vaccine, but few have been afforded little recourse. To date, a mere 11 injury claims have been paid out despite nearly 700 million doses of the vaccine having been administered.”

The pharmaceutical companies that produced COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. were Johnson and Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer. The Washington Times reached out to each company for comment and did not immediately hear back.

Mr. Roy’s bill comes just weeks after the House Oversight panel’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing examining the effectiveness of vaccine safety reporting and injury compensation systems following the rollout of the vaccines.

Biden Administration officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and Health Resources and Services Administration all testified that the U.S. vaccine injury and compensation systems have serious deficiencies related to inadequate staffing, lackluster surveillance, and overlapping programs.

FDA Director Dr. Peter Marks testified that he ignored warnings from his colleagues about the dangers of accelerating the approval process for the COVID-19 vaccines.

He said the vaccine injury reporting and compensation systems were not ready to handle the “avalanche” of injury claims caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.

“We tried to be prepared for that, but the avalanche of reports was tremendous,” he said. “It, again, required re-tasking people on the fly. … We had to usually staff up and had many meetings working to increase our ability to go through these reports.”

A multi-national study of nearly 100 million vaccinated people affirmed previously observed links between some COVID-19 vaccines and adverse side effects. These conditions included Guillain-Barré syndrome, Bell’s palsy, convulsions, myocarditis and pericarditis.

The study by the Global COVID Vaccine Safety Project focused on side effects from the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines. The AstraZeneca vaccine was not available in the U.S.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.