Guest Post: Crack Down on Those Who Don’t Vaccinate?: A Response to Art Caplan |

Dr. Art Caplan recently posted an editorial, “Liability for Failure to Vaccinate,” on this blog. He argues that those who contract infectious disease should be able to recover damages from unvaccinated people who spread it. If you miss work, or your baby has to go to the hospital because of infectious disease, the unvaccinated person who allegedly caused the harm should pay. Dr. Caplan suggests that such liability is apt because vaccines are safe and effective. He sees no difference between this situation and slip-and-fall or car accidents due to negligence. Arguing that “a tiny minority continue to put the rest of us at risk,” he suggests that public health officials can catch the perpetrators and hold them to account through precise disease tracing.

Dr. Caplan’s assertions to the contrary, vaccines are neither completely safe nor completely effective. In fact, from a legal standpoint, vaccines, like all prescription drugs, are “unavoidably unsafe.”  [See, e.g., Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, 562 U.S. __ (2011).‎] Industry considered its liability for vaccine injury so significant that it lobbied Congress for the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, providing doctors and vaccine manufacturers almost blanket liability protection for injuries caused by federally recommended vaccines. [See Authorizing Legislation.] The liability risk was so serious that the federal government created a special tribunal under the 1986 Act, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, to pay the injured. Moreover, the Supreme Court in 2011 decided Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, prohibiting any individual from filing a civil suit for a defectively designed vaccine in any court in the country. Industry’s extraordinary protection against liability for vaccine injury does not correspond with glib statements, like those of Dr. Caplan, that vaccines are safe and effective. On the contrary, the law acknowledges that vaccines cause injury and death to some, with no screening in place to mitigate harm. Dr. Caplan notes that public health officials have “tried to debunk false fears about vaccine safety.” Yet the Institute of Medicine, one the country’s most prestigious health organizations, has acknowledged repeatedly that there are many known vaccine injuries, such as seizures from the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, anaphylaxis from the meningococcal vaccine, and encephalitis from the varicella vaccine. Even more troubling than the identified injuries is the number of potential vaccine adverse effect relationships for which the evidence is not sufficient to either prove or disprove causality. [Committee to Review Adverse Effects of Vaccines, Institute of Medicine, Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality (Kathleen Straton et al. eds., 2012).]

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Guest Post: Crack Down on Those Who Don’t Vaccinate?: A Response to Art Caplan |.