The Absurd GOP

[Angrboda]

There is also a bigger risk, Offit says — one that might sound like a worst-case scenario but is, to him, the most likely one. It is that Kennedy finds an excuse to add autism to the list of compensable vaccine injuries, for which manufacturers are legally responsible. This would be a kind of rerun of the D.P.T. vaccine scare of the early 1980s, when a flood of litigation drove the number of vaccine manufacturers from 18 to four and forced the Reagan administration to step in and establish the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to minimize the exposure of manufacturers. Adding autism, Offit says, would break the program, making it immediately untenable for manufacturers to continue producing or delivering shots in the United States. The liability would be simply too much for drugs that offer the companies almost no profit. Suddenly, we would be faced not with problems of guidance or coverage but of simple accessibility — all those shots that brought such miraculous ends to centuries of infectious diseases in the second half of the last century no longer available in this one.

“I think we are on the verge of losing vaccines for this country, from this country,” Offit says. “And the reason is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will hold up a paper, in the next four or five months, that says it’s aluminum in vaccines that are causing a whole swath of problems, including autism,” he goes on. “I think he is about to destroy vaccines in this country. I do.”

-ibid