Trump administration plans vaccine-injury payments for doctors

The Trump administration is finalizing a Calendar Year 2027 Medicare rule to pay doctors for diagnosing, treating and counseling patients with vaccine side effects, according to a Guardian Health news report on Nov. 15.

The proposal could change incentives around vaccine reporting within a federal compensation system created in 1986 to resolve injury claims outside ordinary lawsuits. Experts cited by The Guardian said the changes may weaken confidence in vaccines.

Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr also announced a vaccine “injury” research center at the National Institutes of Health and has sought changes to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or VICP, the federal system for compensating rare vaccine-related harms.

“I do think he’s a real ideologue – he really believes in this,” Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, said in the report. She added that Kennedy and his allies are likely “very happy to make money doing it”.

Peter Hotez, professor and dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, said Kennedy’s actions were likely a mix of “being an ideological zealot and making money either for himself or for his associates”.

Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, told The Guardian the department “categorically reject claims that Secretary Kennedy is pursuing personal gain or seeking to dismantle American medicine”.

The Guardian reported that, before his January 2025 confirmation hearing, Kennedy disclosed $2.5 million in income from referrals tied to vaccine-related lawsuits. At that hearing, he did not commit to giving up compensation from vaccine lawsuits after leaving office, the report said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, warned at the hearing that Kennedy’s policy decisions could affect future litigation. She cited his involvement in litigation against Merck over its HPV vaccine; The Guardian reported those lawsuits were settled for more than $50 million in June 2026, and that Kennedy later said his son would receive the expected 10% share. The report said it was unclear whether that payment occurred.

The VICP was designed to give people with legitimate vaccine-injury claims a faster path than civil litigation. Reiss told The Guardian that, without that system, patients could lose 30% to 50% of any recovery to lawyers through contingency fees.

The report said the most common VICP claim, accounting for more than half of filings, relates to where a vaccine is administered rather than to the vaccine itself.

A separate issue is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a U.S. system that gathers reports of health events after vaccination. Hotez said VAERS can detect rare safety signals, but is not built to determine whether a vaccine caused a reported event. “The VAERS system was never meant to show cause and effect,” he said.

Aaron Siri, Kennedy’s former lawyer, did not respond to The Guardian’s question about profiting from litigation. He told the outlet that “if vaccines are as ‘safe’ as touted by the government, then there should be no need for immunity to liability and, likewise, there should be very few, if any, successful cases”.

The next policy test is the final shape of the Calendar Year 2027 Medicare physician payment rule and any changes HHS pursues to the vaccine compensation system.

Source: news report, The Guardian Health, Nov. 15, 2026.

Atlas360 reports health research and does not provide medical advice.