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Federal health officials have worked overtime to assure the public that vaccines are safe, and barely acknowledge any exceptions.
But there are exceptions, as our family knows well. In 2001, the government paid a settlement to my son Porter for the brain injuries he suffered from a DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) shot that blew his world to bits. He was paid more than $2.7 million for pain and suffering and for lifetime care for his disabilities, which were later diagnosed to include mental retardation and autism.
The settlement came from a special legal system in Washington, D.C., called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). Informally known as the vaccine court, it was established by Congress in the 1980s to adjudicate claims of vaccine injury and death, and to protect vaccine makers from liability for their products. When a claim is filed, evaluated and conceded, the fund allots money for the care of the vaccine-injured person. You and I pay for this with a surcharge of 75 cents added to the cost of every shot.
In Porter’s case, payments will be made for the rest of his life to cover the ambulance rides, the diapers and the one-on-one supervision he needs to get dressed. They pay for the special van that drives him to a sheltered workshop, where he shreds paper for eight hours a day. Also, for the caregivers who protect him when he gets frustrated and snaps his jaw against a table, trying to crack his teeth.
It wasn’t always like this. In February 1994, Porter changed from a healthy baby to a terribly damaged one in the course of a day, when his adverse reaction to a shot landed him in the emergency room with a raging fever and two-hour seizure.
What happened to Porter is mercifully rare, but hardly a one-off. Since its inception, the VICP has paid more than $3.1 billion to compensate nearly 4,600 cases of vaccine-related injury or death. Although the court has denied claims asserting that vaccines had caused autism, it has awarded compensation to some children who had autism-like symptoms or who, like my son, were later diagnosed as having autism, according to a study in the Pace Environmental Law Review.
Sarah Bridges
Health authorities have not gone out of their way to promote the vaccine compensation program. It is so obscure that most people, and even some clinicians, don’t know it exists. I certainly didn’t and, despite the horror of what happened to our son, count myself as fortunate to have learned about it at all. A few lucky things occurred: The emergency room doctor who treated Porter corroborated his injury in medical records, and made a filing through the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to document his DPT reaction. Furthermore, at the time of Porter’s injury I was working in a medical school while finishing a PhD in neuropsychology. My graduate advisor, a neurologist, encouraged me to pursue a claim, emphasizing that brain injuries were rare but were documented effects of DPT inoculations.
Yet when I told our pediatrician about our claim, she pointed to a wall poster from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of a smiling toddler, arm outstretched for a shot, and told me she didn’t know the VICP existed.
The vaccine court is supposed to deliver fast, efficient justice, with a lower threshold of proof than in a civil court. Yet the process took nearly eight years, due, in part, to the government losing records, changing lawyers and quibbling about how much to pay for things like diapers and therapy.
In the meantime, Porter racked up innumerable hospital stays, unpaid medical bills and a diagnosis of severe autism. He became increasingly hyperactive, jumping off tables and bouncing off walls. My other children tried to make sense of what had happened. His younger brother announced, “Porter is like a rabbit. Well, a brain-damaged rabbit.” Along the way, my marriage cracked. We grew estranged from each other since it was impossible to be mad at our son. Yet, while the vaccine court experience was grueling, the system ultimately worked. We’re thankful to the point of tears for the financial help Porter received.
Today, it seems that few things are as politically incorrect as raising questions about the vaccine program. If you do, you may be demonized or called a nut job. Despite what happened to our son, my two younger children were vaccinated and my personal view is that vaccines provide major health benefits. But trust in the program is shaky. That trust has been damaged by the lack of an honest and nuanced conversation about the rare side effects.
The fact that the government takes financial responsibility for the medical needs of victims like our son should be a very public part of the message. This more honorable message would go like this: “Vaccines have helped countless millions of people. The odds of serious harm are very small, though severe injuries do happen. In the rare cases that children are disabled, we’ll step up to pay for their care.”
Sarah Bridges is a psychologist, speaker and author. Her memoir, “A Bad Reaction,” chronicling her son’s vaccine injury, is published by Skyhorse Press.
good points raised here! Tribal groupthink among liberals: “people who raise questions are ignorant science-deniers” while corresponding conservative mantra: “vaccines are all a globalist-illuminati conspiracy”…what’s urgently needed is a lot more openmindedness plus sympathy for the afflicted minority who suffer in order that the majority may thrive. Real lives are at stake. Just because “only” a few suffer devastating consequences of public health programs, does not mean they should be held up to ridicule and be considered outcasts. Nor should the obvious widespread benefits of public health policies be cynically discounted by paranoid rightwing fearmongering. Nuanced discussion on this kind of emotionally charged issue (climate change is another perfect example) too often gets eclipsed by tribal/ideological agendas. And, worst of all, science gets hijacked and corrupted.
I interviewed Sarah Bridges for my book, The Vaccine Court. Over the course of 2 interviews and several email exchanges, I have come to know a very tenacious mother who would not give up and continues to advocate for her son Porter and others who have been vaccine injured. Bravo to you Sarah. Best of luck with your new book.
Thank you for posting this. My heart breaks for what you and your family–and thousands of others– went through.
My son had a similar reaction to yours; within an hour of his 2-month shots, he started what we later learned was a seizure reaction and encephalopathy that lasted for 4 hours. Since he got several shots, including DTP, we have no idea whether it was the DTP alone that caused the reaction, or one of the other shots, or the combination of shots.
But when I frantically called the pediatrician’s office, the nurse insisted that I was over-reacting, and literally reprimanded me for being hysterical.
I’ll never forget her words.
“Vaccines don’t do that.”
Once I started researching what vaccines can and can’t do, I learned more than I ever wanted to know.
At this point, I can’t agree with your statement, “vaccines have helped countless millions of people.”
The truth is, we don’t know the extent of the damage that they can do. We never even figured out the extent of the damage caused by the 1994 schedule, because it was never studied in its entirety.
Now that it’s basically doubled since then, and vaccines are given to women in all stages of pregnancy, as well as to infants the day that they’re born, WE WILL NEVER KNOW.
We don’t even know if they contribute to the development of cancer later in life, because that’s never been studied.
I used to want a more nuanced discussion of vaccines.
What I’ve learned is that we need to stop talking about “vaccines” as though they were all equally safe, effective, and necessary.
Vaccines for influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, rotavirus, hepatitis B, human papilloma virus, meningitis, tetanus, pertussis–NONE of the current vaccines are necessary to give to infants in developed countries.
The first 4 are not dangerous diseases.
Rotavirus is spread via the fecal/oral route.
Hepatitis B and hpv are spread by unprotected sex and tainted needles.
Tetanus isn’t even contagious, and is certainly not a risk for an infant in a developed country.
Pertussis is certainly very serious in infants–but the current vaccine does not prevent the vaccinated individual from colonizing and spreading the disease; worse, the vaccinated individual may have no symptoms at all when doing so.
In fact, the same thing is true of diphtheria and HIB vaccines.
RFK’s excellent cost/benefit analysis of the meningitis vaccine shows that it will cost more lives than it will save.
That leaves polio.
The fact is that the diagnostic criteria for polio was changed the year the vaccine was introduced; rates of “acute flaccid paralysis,” “transverse myelitis,” “aseptic meningitis,” “spinal meningitis,” and “Guillain-Barr syndrome” increased to the same extent that diagnoses of polio decreased.
We need a close look at what the government and the vaccine industry have been doing all along.
Start by reviewing the CBS documentary on the damage from the swine flu shot in 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpmtH-cYGyg Th
The conversation will certainly resonate with today’s parents of vaccine-injured children, who will wonder why nobody told them that this was all known 40 years ago.
Here is a partial transcript:
MIKE WALLACE: Did anyone ever come to you and say, “You know something, fellows, there’s the possibility of neurological damage if you get into a mass immunization program?”
DR DAVID SENCER (DIRECTOR OF THE CDC): No
WALLACE: No one ever did?
DR SENCER: No
WALLACE: Do you know Michael Hattwick?
DR SENCER: Yes, uh-hmm.
WALLACE: Dr Michael Hattwick directed the surveillance team for the swine flu program at the CDC. His job was to find out what possible complications could arise from taking the shot and to report his findings to those in charge. Did you know ahead of time, Dr Hattwick that there had been case reports of neurological disorders, neurological illness, apparently associated with the injection of influenza vaccine?
DR MICHAEL HATTWICK: Absolutely
WALLACE: You did?
DR HATTWICK: Yes
WALLACE: How did you know that?
DR HATTWICK: By review of the literature.
WALLACE: So you told your superiors – the men in charge of the swine flu immunization program – about the possibility of neurological disorders?
DR HATTWICK: Absolutely
WALLACE: What would you say if I told you that your superiors say that you never told them about the possibility of neurological complications?
DR HATTWICK: That’s nonsense. I can’t believe that they would say that they did not know that there were neurological illnesses associated with influenza vaccination. That simply is not true. We did know that.
DR SENCER: I have said that Dr Hattwick had never told me of his feelings on this subject.
WALLACE: Then he’s lying?
DR SENCER: I guess you would have to make that assumption.
WALLACE: Then why does this report from your own agency, dated July 1976, list neurological complications as a possibility?
DR SENCER: I think the consensus of the scientific community was that the evidence relating neurologic disorders to influenza immunization was such that they did not feel that this association was a real one.
WALLACE: You didn’t feel it was necessary to tell the American people that information
DR SENCER: I think that over the – the years we have tried to inform the American people as – as fully as possible.
WALLACE: As part of informing Americans about the swine flu threat, Dr Sencer’s CDC also helped create the advertising to get the public to take the shot. Let me read to your from one of your own agency’s memos planning the campaign to urge Americans to take the shot. “The swine flu vaccine has been taken by many important persons,” he wrote. “Example: President Ford, Henry Kissinger, Elton John, Muhammad Ah, Mary Tyler Moore, Rudolf Nureyev, Walter Cronkite, Ralph Nader, Edward Kennedy” -etcetera, etcetera, True?
DR SENCER: I’m not familiar with that particular piece of paper, but I do know that, at least of that group, President Ford did take the vaccination.
WALLACE: Did you talk to these people beforehand to find out if they planned to take the shot?
DR SENCER: I did not, no.
WALLACE: Did anybody?
DR SENCER: I do not know.
WALLACE: Did you get permission to use their names in your campaign?
DR SENCER: I do not know.
WALLACE: Mary, did you take a swine flu shot?
MARY TYLER MOORE: No, I did not.
WALLACE: Did you give them permission to use your name saying that you had or were going to?
MOORE: Absolutely not. Never did.
This is an important societal issue that too often gets polarized into “vaccines kill kids” versus “people against vaccines kill kids.”
It is a real-world manifestation of the classic philosophical dilemma of the man at the railroad switch. Leave the switch alone and 5 men die, move the switch an only one man dies. Which is the moral thing to do?
I have a cousin-in-law (i.e. wife’s cousin) that suffered paralysis, indistinguishable from that produced by polio, in response to receiving the polio vaccine (they apparently now call it VAPP, but at the time the doctors told her family it couldn’t be the vaccine…). Some large number of children were certainly spared a similar fate by virtue of the public health programs that delivered the polio vaccine to her. Yet, by moving that switch, she was sentenced to life in a wheelchair.
I tend to be a fan of the “greatest good” branch of philosophy, but I think that the zeal and enthusiasm for sparing the 5 men (at the cost of the one) is causing too little attention to figuring out ways to save some of those “1s”
I was unaware of VICP until reading this article. It absolutely needs to be better publicized. Likewise, more effort need to go into proper reporting of vaccine related adverse events. Only then will the true costs and benefits of vaccination be generally known. Only in that way can the needs of the proverbial “5” be balanced against the needs of those that are the “1” such as Porter and my cousin.