Secretary Kennedy to Create COVID Vaccine Injury Table for Compensation
RFK Jr.’s Covid Vaccine Injury Table Is a Start — But It’s Not Enough
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that HHS plans to propose a Covid-19 countermeasures injury table — a list of conditions presumed to be caused by Covid vaccines that would make it easier for injured individuals to seek compensation from the government. The proposal is slated for November.
Welcome news? Yes. Overdue? Absolutely.
The Science Has Been There Since April 2024
Here’s what the headlines haven’t emphasized enough: we’ve known the scientific foundation for this injury table for over two years.
In April 2024, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) — one of the most rigorous and respected scientific bodies in the United States — published a comprehensive report reviewing the evidence on adverse events following Covid-19 vaccination. The NASEM committee, composed of independent physicians and researchers with no financial stake in the outcome, concluded that credible scientific evidence supports a causal relationship between certain Covid vaccines and a range of serious injuries, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and other conditions.
This was not fringe science. This was not a conspiracy theory. This was peer-reviewed, independently vetted analysis — the gold standard of evidence-based medicine.
And yet, here we are in July 2026, fourteen months after Secretary Kennedy took office, with a proposal to propose an injury table slated for November. If the science has been settled since April 2024, what exactly has taken so long?
The families I represent — people who suffered myocarditis, who developed Guillain-Barré, who lost wages and incurred six-figure medical bills — have been waiting. They’ve been waiting while their claims sat in a compensation program specifically designed to pay as little as possible.
Good Intentions, Wrong Program
Here’s the deeper problem with what Secretary Kennedy has announced: an injury table is only as valuable as the compensation program behind it.
Right now, Covid vaccine injury claims run through the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) — a program administered by HHS that was designed for emergency public health situations. The CICP sounds official. It is, in practice, a dead end for most claimants.
The CICP does not compensate for pain and suffering — at all. It caps reimbursement for medical bills and wage loss, leaving seriously injured people to absorb costs that can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are no attorneys’ fees, meaning injured individuals must navigate a complex bureaucratic process largely on their own. And unlike the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), there is no independent adjudication by a Special Master — just an HHS bureaucrat reviewing your claim.
Compare that to the VICP, the program that covers injuries from routine recommended vaccines. The VICP provides compensation for pain and suffering. It covers reasonable medical expenses and lost wages without the same caps. It provides a death benefit. It has an injury table — which is exactly what Kennedy is proposing to create for Covid vaccines — that shifts the burden of proof, making it far easier for injured people to qualify. And it has a robust adversarial process with Special Masters and attorney fee provisions that actually allow lawyers to take these cases.
The injury table announcement focuses on the CICP. If that doesn’t change, we will have a more organized list of injuries pointing injured Americans toward a program that still won’t adequately compensate them.
What Secretary Kennedy Should Do
Secretary Kennedy has said he wants to be a champion for the vaccine-injured. He has the platform, the authority, and now — with the NASEM report in hand — the scientific predicate to do something genuinely transformative.
The right move is not just a Covid injury table in the CICP. The right move is to bring Covid vaccine injury claims into the VICP, where the full weight of the federal compensation framework can actually make injured families whole. See COVID Vaccine Injury Reform.
That means:
Compensation for pain and suffering
Uncapped recovery for medical expenses and lost wages
Independent adjudication by Special Masters insulated from HHS
An injury table in the VICP — backed by the NASEM science — that finally gives Covid vaccine injury claimants a real presumption of causation
The NASEM committee did the hard scientific work. The framework for adequate compensation already exists. What’s missing is the political will to connect the two.
November cannot come soon enough — but when it does, the proposal needs to go further than what has been announced.
Congress Has Already Written the Roadmap
While the HHS announcement focuses on creating a Covid injury table within the CICP, Congress has already drafted the more complete solution. Representative Lloyd Doggett's Vaccine Modernization Act, HR 5142 — introduced in each of the last three sessions of Congress — would do precisely what Kennedy's proposal stops short of: bring Covid-19 vaccines into the VICP itself, not the CICP. The bill would require HHS to add Covid vaccines to the Vaccine Injury Table, create a path for individuals previously denied under the CICP to seek relief in the VICP, raise the pain-and-suffering cap from the 1986-era $250,000 to $600,000 (indexed to inflation going forward), and increase the number of Special Masters — along with the court staff needed to support them — to handle the inevitable uptick in Covid vaccine injury filings quickly and efficiently, rather than letting cases languish for years in an understaffed system. In other words, Kennedy's table-building exercise at HHS and Doggett's legislation are not in conflict — they point in the same direction. An injury table is useful infrastructure. But infrastructure only matters if it connects to the right destination. HR 5142 ensures that destination is the VICP, where compensation for pain and suffering, uncapped wage loss, and independent adjudication are actually available. If Secretary Kennedy is serious about making Covid vaccine injury claimants whole — not just making it marginally easier to file a claim that still gets processed through an inadequate program — his agency should be actively supporting this legislation. The Vaccine Modernization Act of 2026 is expected to be reintroduced this month — making this the ideal moment for HHS and Congress to move in the same direction at the same time.
David Carney is a vaccine injury attorney at Carney Vaccine Law. He represents individuals and families pursuing compensation for injuries following vaccination. This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.