Vaccines

We Lost the Lyme Vaccine. Under Rand Paul's New Vaccine Liability Bill, We'll Lose More.

The End the Vaccine Carveout Act would expose vaccine makers to lawsuits that once drove companies out of the industry.

Ronald Bailey | 3.5.2026 1:56 PM

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Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) seems to have forgotten a key lesson from vaccine policy history. His End the Vaccine Carveout Act aims to weaken, if not abolish, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) and strip COVID-19 vaccines of liability protection under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act's Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program. The bill would allow "individuals who suffer vaccine-related injury or death to pursue direct civil action in state or federal court without first being forced into a federal no-fault system that limits recovery and restricts legal options."

The only problem: been there, done that, and didn't like it much.

Why did Congress vote to adopt the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986? In his 1985 article, "Vaccines and Product Liability: A Case of Contagious Litigation," published in the Cato Institute's Regulation magazine, legal scholar Edmund Kitch pointed to several badly decided state and federal product liability judgments that were driving many pharmaceutical companies out of the business of developing and manufacturing vaccines. Consequently, he explained that "the development of liability law now threatens to make both existing and promising new vaccines sporadically or entirely unavailable to a public and medical community that wants and needs them." It was this trend toward erratic and excessive civil court tort judgments that worried Congress back then.

In response to these concerns, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, creating the VICP, a no-fault alternative to the traditional tort system that........

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