HHS Moves to Create List of COVID Vaccine Injuries

HHS is paving the way to create an injury table for COVID countermeasures — such as vaccines — under the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).

The Health Resources and Services Administration posted a notice that it will introduce a proposed rule in November to establish the injury table, with the comment period ending in January 2027.

Currently, only two CICP injury tables exist: one for smallpox and another for pandemic influenza H1N1. While people who believe they’ve been harmed by other countermeasures, including those for COVID, can still file a claim with the CICP, the burden of proof of injury is much higher.

Having an injury table would lessen that burden, experts said, which wouldn’t be a bad thing for well-established COVID countermeasure-related injuries, such as myocarditis following mRNA vaccination, or thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome after the Janssen vaccine.

However, there are concerns that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would add “more speculative or weakly supported conditions,” said Richard H. Hughes IV, the lead attorney on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ lawsuit against Kennedy’s changes to the pediatric vaccine schedule.

“If HHS listed broad neurologic syndromes, POTS/dysautonomia, chronic fatigue-type conditions, autoimmune conditions, sudden cardiac death theories, or loosely defined ‘vaccine injury’ categories without strong evidence, that could be used to claim that the federal government has affirmed causation,” Hughes wrote in an email to MedPage Today.

“A compensation table should not be converted into a vehicle for validating unsupported injury narratives,” he added.

Kennedy has long been threatening to revamp a sister program, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).

Last year, Kennedy said in a post on X that he would “fix” the VICP as it has “devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption.”

He has since taken steps to do so. In late 2025, HHS convened a hasty end-of-year meeting of the VICP’s Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines (ACCV), which advises on VICP policies and procedures, including its injury table. The group is supposed to meet four times per year, but that was its only meeting in 2025.

At the beginning of this year, Kennedy removed at least four members of the ACCV, leading some to suspect he was reshaping that panel as he has with numerous other HHS agency advisory groups.

Kennedy also revived a dormant childhood vaccine safety task force that ended its work almost 30 years ago. It was supposed to work closely with the ACCV, but there appears to be little activity since it was announced almost a year ago.

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