Cathy Meehan: Today’s conversation on the Meehan Mission podcast takes us into an important chapter of American public health law. I’m joined by Kim M. Rosenberg, senior staff attorney with Children’s Health Defense. Kim has dedicated much of her career to legal advocacy, constitutional rights, and helping families better understand the laws and policies that shape health care in the United States. We’ll discuss the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, why it was passed, and how it gave pharmaceutical companies liability shield to vaccine injury. It’s four decades later, and we’re still fighting for the right to informed consent and justice for the injured. Please join me in welcoming Kim to the Meehan Mission Podcast.
Cathy Meehan: Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of the Meehan Mission Podcast and I am excited because I have not only an expert but also I’m going to call her my friend and it’s Kim M. Rosenberg from Children’s Health Defense. Kim, how are you today?
Kim M. Rosenberg: I am doing great today, Cathy, and absolutely you are my friend and I am thrilled to be here with you.
Cathy Meehan: Well, it’s so great. You know, we met because, you know, we love to fight for medical freedom and I am so proud of all of the work that you have done, but what I really want to do is introduce you to our community. So, Kim, if you’ll just give us a little bit of a background and, you know, how did you get to where you are today?
Kim M. Rosenberg: Sure. So, I am a lawyer. I’ve been practicing for longer than I want to admit. Um, and I started off working in products liability and insurance coverage issues. And I got into medical freedom like so many in the movement because of my own child and his vaccine injury. And you know, thanks to a lot of intervention, a lot of prayer, um, a lot of work, he’s doing really, really well. He is mildly on the autism spectrum um and has some other health issues, but he’s doing very well. But that started me first on my personal journey of helping to heal him. And eventually that morphed into by the time he was about seven or eight years old, a lot of advocacy work and then eventually legal work with respect to these issues. And um I joined Children’s Health Defense. I worked with them as outside counsel in some cases before, but joined them first as acting general counsel in April of 2023 and now for the past several years as full-time general counsel there. So, I get to—and it really is an honor every day. I love waking up to do my job. I wish my job didn’t have to be done, right? I wish we had true medical freedom and true informed consent, but I wake up every day knowing that my job has a real purpose, which is meaningful to me.
Cathy Meehan: Yes.
Kim M. Rosenberg: And I oversee the work that our outside counsel partners with us on. We have a number of lawyers we work with in this space who are terrific. They are dedicated. They are smart. They are savvy. They are creative thinkers. And then with our in-house team as well on litigation. So there’s a real partnership there with all of us and then I deal with, you know, the day-to-day issues that in-house counsel deal with at any corporation, any business. So there is, you know, there’s always something happening at CHD. There’s so much and there are others out there as well. There’s so much work to be done. There really is.
Cathy Meehan: There is. There is so much work. And you know, I love that you love to get up every day and do your work because I know I wake up and I’m like, you know, we have a purpose. We have a mission. And I really feel like it’s almost like we’re a tribe of people from all walks of life that have either personally experienced some sort of a medical injury or a loved one has experienced some sort of a medical injury. And you are right—there is so much work to be done. I mean, I feel like you’ve been in this battle for a long time. I’ve been in it for about a decade and the amount of awareness that needs to be made, it’s amazing that we’ve done so much that we have done, but we still have so much to do. Which specifically I wanted you to come on because we have this thing, the 1986 National Vaccine Injury Act, and I’m just not sure that enough people realize why this act actually came about and what it does and why there’s such an importance for what we call informed consent, which means risks, benefits, and alternatives when any medical procedure is going to be happening—and specifically in this case we’re talking about vaccines because, Kim, are vaccines safe and effective?
Kim M. Rosenberg: “Safe and effective” to me, Cathy, is a marketing line. It is not proven that these vaccines—particularly the safety end of things; there are questions about how effective they are, too—but the safety end is really not proven. None of the vaccines have really been tested against a true saline placebo. In the one case where a vaccine had some saline placebo in the trial, the children in that trial and the young people in that trial had already received multiple doses of a different version of the vaccine that was being tested. So it wasn’t—even though in that snapshot in time there was some saline—it wasn’t a true saline placebo test because of the other parameters of the trial. But none of the other vaccines have been tested against a true saline placebo, and some have no control that they’re tested against. So we look at hepatitis B vaccines, and they were given in one trial to a few hundred children ages 0 to 10. We don’t know how many were actually infants and young children versus 9 or 10-year-olds. And there was no control and they were followed for five to seven days depending on the trial. So you’re looking for really acute, almost immediate reactions, and then outside that window they’re not following for some of the long-term reactions that we see, including autoimmunity and other chronic conditions.
Cathy Meehan: Right.
Kim M. Rosenberg: So, and we’ve never tested the schedule as a whole. What used to be known as the Institute of Medicine…
Cathy Meehan: That’s shocking. Shocking. The entire vaccine schedule that they require our children from 0 to what, 17? And depending on how you count it, we know there’s at least 70.
Kim M. Rosenberg: Right. And there’s more, right?
Cathy Meehan: And never been tested for outcome. That’s insanity. So, well, that kind of brings us to: what really was happening like in the 1980s that actually instigated the whole need for the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act? What was happening then?
Kim M. Rosenberg: Sure. So back in the ’80s there were only a handful of vaccines that were suggested for children and one of those was diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and it was whole-cell pertussis. And we think that that was causing a lot of reactions and some very dangerous, very serious reactions in children, and people were filing lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. Vaccine manufacturers were getting concerned—I think concerned mostly about their bottom line, frankly—but were threatening to leave the market, to leave the vaccine market: “People are going to sue us, we’re going to end up paying out a lot of money, this isn’t good business for us, so we’re going to leave the market.” Government panics a little bit because they’ve already started to set up vaccines as this keystone, cornerstone of public health, that we need vaccines in order to be healthy and safe.
We know if you go back and you look at—you know, I was a co-author of a book called Vaccine Epidemic, and in Vaccine Epidemic we have a chart that appears elsewhere, appears other places, and I believe it’s from—it may be from CDC—right, but it shows the decrease in mortality from a whole variety of diseases, which really started with more solid public health measures being put in place: cleaner water, indoor plumbing. People, you know, we can debate the safety of car emissions, etc., but cars instead of horses with manure in the streets. So refrigeration was coming in—all of those things were stopping a lot of death from these common illnesses, and that includes illnesses that we still don’t vaccinate against, right? Scarlet fever, for example, can be bad—we don’t want people to have scarlet fever—but deaths from scarlet fever declined precipitously, as did deaths from all quote-unquote “vaccine-preventable diseases” as well. So that by the time the vaccines started to be introduced, like the measles vaccine, deaths from measles had already pretty much bottomed out to where it still is. And so these vaccines weren’t coming in and stopping people from dying in large part.
But we only had a handful then. But we still had panic on the part of the manufacturers. And it is never easy—any lawyer who works in product liability, especially pharmaceutical liability, will tell you these cases are not easy cases to bring, and they can be very expensive in the regular courts. You’re spending a lot of money on expert witnesses to testify, you’re taking depositions, you’re doing what’s called discovery, where the sides exchange documents. And in some of these cases, you have millions and millions of documents, and someone has to look at them and try to find the documents that are helpful to you, regardless of which side you’re on. So those cases are not inexpensive, they’re not always straightforward. I mean, sometimes you see a more straightforward case where you’re like, “Yes, this caused this”—often those cases will settle. But everyone is spending a lot of money and a lot of effort litigating these cases.
And so the government stepped in and what was developed was the 1986 Act, and it was theoretically a compromise. Okay? And one of the things it did was created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the VICP. And the VICP was intended to be sort of this non-adversarial way for families to come in who had experienced vaccine injury or death, get compensated for the harm. The compensation didn’t come from the manufacturers; it came from the U.S. government. It comes from an excise tax on every vaccine that’s administered in the country, okay? And it covers the vaccines that went into that program, which were the vaccines that are on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)’s recommended schedule, okay? And so there are vaccines that adults receive, like influenza, that are still covered in VICP, in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, because they’re on the childhood recommended schedule now, okay? Other vaccines might be outside the parameters of that schedule. So, for example, we don’t recommend shingles vaccine for children…
Cathy Meehan: Not yet.
Kim M. Rosenberg: Waiting for them to recommend that for kids—let’s hope they can’t hear us talking about recommending shingles vaccines! But those vaccines fall outside of the program. So okay, for those childhood vaccines, they put them into the program. It’s supposed to be non-adversarial, the government pays out the payout. But what it also did was create a liability shield for the vaccine manufacturers and for those who administer vaccines. So doctors, nurses, other medical professionals—you can’t just go, if you’re injured by, let’s say, a chickenpox vaccine, a varicella vaccine, you can’t just say, “Well, I’m going to sue the manufacturer of that vaccine because I’ve been injured.” You now have to go into the program at least as a starting point. It’s very difficult to go beyond that and sue the manufacturer. But as a starting point, you don’t get to sue your doctor unless the doctor committed real malpractice there. You don’t get to sue the manufacturer, the pharmaceutical company. You’re suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice is representing them.
Cathy Meehan: So they are representing themselves because they don’t want to pay it out, right?
Kim M. Rosenberg: Right. And then the person who’s injured, they have to bring in their own legal counsel and pay for their own legal counsel. So one thing the program does fairly well is cover legal fees for lawyers who represent families or an injured individual in the program—you don’t get paid till the end, but…
Cathy Meehan: But you have to win your case, don’t you?
Kim M. Rosenberg: You don’t have to win your case to get fees. And there’s a whole bar—it’s called the plaintiffs’ bar, a bar of lawyers who work in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
Cathy Meehan: Do they work for the government?
Kim M. Rosenberg: No, those lawyers do not work for the government. They are private. Department of Justice represents HHS. These are private lawyers who represent individuals and families.
Cathy Meehan: Okay. Wow. Something that might be fair, right?
Kim M. Rosenberg: It’s a little more fair than a lot of other things in the program because the program was set up to theoretically be this non-adversarial place. You go in, you demonstrate you’ve had an injury, it looks more likely than not that you’ve had this injury from the vaccine, and you get payment. You know, they sometimes work with life planners to figure out what appropriate amounts are depending on the type of injury, right? If you have an injury that affects the mobility of your shoulder, that’s a lot different of a payout than someone who is now in a wheelchair, or someone who is blind, or someone who’s developed multiple sclerosis or all kinds of injuries out there.
Cathy Meehan: Is there a cap to that, what they’ll figure out?
Kim M. Rosenberg: There’s a cap for death. I believe it’s around $250,000.
Cathy Meehan: That sounds familiar.
Kim M. Rosenberg: The reason it’s low is if you think about this, you’re now not looking at life planning and the cost of life and what their earning potential was. So there is—as much as I hate it—there is sort of a logical reason behind that.
Cathy Meehan: There shouldn’t be death in the first place, right?
Kim M. Rosenberg: Right, there should not be death in the first place. And then they have what are called table injuries and non-table injuries. So there is a table, which can be amended through statutory ways put together by HHS, which basically says for X vaccine, Y injury that occurs in Z period of time is presumed compensable. It’s presumed related to the vaccine. So oftentimes that’s 48–72 hours within vaccination and a very specific injury. If you have an injury that is not on the table—and it’s a pretty short table—then there’s more of a burden on you to prove the connection between the vaccine and the injury.
But what you don’t get that you would get pre-Act, when people were suing the pharmaceutical companies for injuries from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, you would get that discovery, right? You would get documents. You don’t get discovery as of right from the United States government in the VICP, and you certainly don’t get discovery as of right from the pharmaceutical industry. Those manufacturers aren’t even a party to your action in the VICP. So there is very little discovery, and you have to ask the special masters. There aren’t judges in the VICP; it’s not a court. They have special masters who oftentimes are lawyers, but they are not judges.
Cathy Meehan: Do they work for the government?
Kim M. Rosenberg: They work for the government. As does every federal judge in the country, by the way, right? But keep that in mind—their paychecks all come from the U.S. government. But so these special masters are the ones who oversee the cases. There are hearings, there is expert testimony, there are expert reports exchanged, but you’re not getting that really important discovery piece.
Cathy Meehan: I think that would be very important.
Kim M. Rosenberg: It’s very important because if I believe a product, whether it’s a vaccine or a pill or an injection of some sort, has harmed me or a family member, I want to see what the manufacturer knew about that, what they studied about that, right? All of that. So all of that is foreclosed; you’re not getting that as of right in the compensation program. And the other huge—I mean, there are so many things wrong with the program, but the time by which you have to file following your first symptom of injury is very short. For death it’s two years; for an injury to a person who is still living, it’s three years from the onset of symptoms. So a lot of families are precluded from it because maybe their child has some sort of reaction and they go to or call the pediatrician, and the pediatrician notes that, and it may not even be a significant immediate reaction—just “Mom says they just got the vaccine and the baby has a fever of 104.” Time goes by, you learn about the vaccine and maybe more symptoms develop, then you learn about the program, and your child’s 5 years old now and this happened back when they were six months old. You can’t go back to the chart way back when they had that fever and count that as the first symptom. So people get foreclosed from the program all the time because they don’t realize that.
Cathy Meehan: Gosh, especially if you think about it, the number of vaccinations today… Number one, they’re getting it on day one. That’s always been my theory: they give Hep B on day one of birth so that you don’t have a normal, functioning, healthy baby to compare anything to. And then think about the number of vaccines that they get at 6 months, which is one of their most heavy ones. And not only that, most recorded SIDS cases occur right after the six-month battery of vaccinations. I mean, so that timeline—if you have a child that is truly injured by vaccinations, that’s going to be so difficult to work with that timeline.
Kim M. Rosenberg: It is very challenging. And I agree with you about Hep B at birth. One of the architects of our modern childhood immunization program once was asked why Hep B was given at birth, and his response was, “Because we can.” So they have a captive audience and they have parents—mom has just given birth, you’re in a very emotionally and physically vulnerable position, and you want to do what’s right for your child. And if you haven’t thought about this, planned ahead, read anything, you may not know that there’s a choice. And if you’re pressured, and sometimes even if you know you have a choice, there are threats to call Child Protective Services and not let you and the baby leave the hospital. The pressure is tremendous on new parents.
Cathy Meehan: I mean, I’m just going to bring it: Jim and I had five kids, and I’ll tell you, every single one of them vaccinated. Jim was not only a med student but also a resident and a practicing physician while they were all born, and back then vaccines were “safe and effective.” I trusted my pediatrician. I did not know, and that’s why we’ve got to keep doing—that’s why you and I wake up every morning, because we have a job to do, and that is just to save one more baby. Anyway, so I didn’t mean to go too far off tangent on that, but I had no idea what Hep B was doing to my baby or what was in it or anything like that. And by the grace of God, they are pretty healthy children. They had pneumonia, asthma, eczema, you know, all those issues which are vaccine-related, but they’re thriving today. So thank you, God, for blessing my kids with good health with ignorant parents.
Kim M. Rosenberg: Well, we know better now and we know more now, now our kids are grown up, right? But new parents don’t necessarily know all that, and that’s why educating them is so important. And even educating young people who are not ready to be parents yet—they’re teenagers, whatever they are—so that they can make the right choices down the line, both for themselves and for their future families. And what is supposed to happen, again as part of the 1986 Act, there’s a document called a Vaccine Information Statement, a VIS, that is supposed to be given to a parent or legal guardian…
Cathy Meehan: They receive those after the child… A lot of people walk out the door… I remember getting those sheets, and it said nothing about the ingredients in the vaccine, it said nothing about serious adverse events. I just remember swelling, possible fever, the minor things. They did not really give you full informed consent of risks, benefits, and alternatives.
Kim M. Rosenberg: No, they don’t. And a lot of people don’t receive them. They should be given to you before, right, so that you can read it, ask questions if you have them. It does give you information about the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program on there, but many pediatricians don’t give those documents. Nowadays everything’s on computers—which makes me sound really old—when they’re printing out your super bill, they’re printing out the VIS along with it and giving it to you. But they don’t have a lot of information. I mean, you and I have both seen package inserts for vaccines, which is where a lot more relevant information may be housed. Not all the information you want, but those are huge—this huge foldout with many parts and subparts, and the print is tiny. But there you can read information about clinical trials, what they consider safe levels, adverse reactions, adverse events that have been reported, ingredients included in the vaccine. That information is on the package insert. Most parents wouldn’t even know to ask for the package insert or know that they can go onto any vaccine manufacturer’s website and pull it up. It’s usually in the prescribing medical professional section that they can pull up that package insert and read through it and search for reactions.
Cathy Meehan: And a lot of doctors haven’t sat down and read the package insert.
Kim M. Rosenberg: No. Well, yeah—we don’t even need to get into the fact that these doctors do not know what they do not know, and they don’t want to know what they do not know because it will affect their bottom line.
Kim M. Rosenberg: Well, plenty of talk on that. Cathy, I think it’s really important—one of the big lawsuits that Children’s Health Defense is supporting right now, and we’re a plaintiff in, is a lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics under the federal RICO—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. I hope I got that acronym right! But RICO, which had been originally put in place to deal with organized crime like the mafia, was used against tobacco manufacturers, and that’s really the model that we’re following here. You look at the AAP, and it’s got about 67,000 members. Almost every pediatrician in the country is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics—that’s the FAAP after their names. And it’s really a trade organization that’s there to protect its members and, among other things, help members maximize their pay. They have a whole section on the AAP website about basically how to run your office in a way that’s going to maximize your profits, etc. And I’m not saying doctors shouldn’t make money—like every profession, they’re entitled to make money—but not money at the expense of children’s health.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. And creating that conveyor belt I was talking about. They create this conveyor belt of, you know, if they do develop asthma or eczema or autism spectrum, all of those things are just repeat visits for the doctor’s office.
Kim M. Rosenberg: Yeah, the phrase I use is “customers for life.” The pharmaceutical industry and the doctors have customers for life now, right? I like your conveyor belt analogy, too. But AAP—so we’re suing AAP, and among the things we point out is that the Institute of Medicine has twice said we need to look at the schedule as a whole and determine the safety of the schedule as a whole. Never been done; everyone just ignores the Institute of Medicine. But the AAP, in a separate lawsuit, sued the Secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for changes made in January of this year to the ACIP recommended schedule, and for some other changes that had gone on as well as how the ACIP was constituted, new members added, and people removed. So they’re suing HHS, we’re suing AAP. But in that lawsuit that AAP brought against the secretary, they sought what’s called a preliminary injunction—asking the court to stop these changes that HHS has put into place. And they actually got their preliminary injunction; it’s up on appeal now. But to support their motion, they included declarations from doctors which said things like, “If I have to talk with parents about vaccines”—which says to me that it’s not happening now—”then I will be able to see fewer patients in a day. And if I see fewer patients in a day, I make less money. Plus, I’m going to have parents who don’t want to take vaccines after we have this conversation.”
And a lot of doctors are feeling demoralized when they read something like this or see things in their own practice, and many will talk openly about how for many of them, medicine has become a business, not the practice of medicine. Particularly if a doctor is affiliated with an HMO, a health maintenance organization, those structures impose time limits—eight minutes a patient, 13 minutes a patient, whatever it is. That’s not much time at all for a doctor to really have any sort of meaningful dialogue with a patient on risks, benefits, and alternatives. They can’t do that in that short amount of time. And so what it says to me too is that they’re admitting essentially that their patients aren’t getting informed consent about vaccines because they’re not having that dialogue. They tell the patients the marketing line: “they’re safe and effective.” And again, the business of medicine—they’re not going home at night and reading the package insert; they’re trying to catch up on their notes and patient records. It’s not that they’re not working long hours, but the system is set up to discourage the kind of dialogue that should be happening around vaccines. And again, going back to what we said at the very beginning, because of the 1986 Act, they’re also not liable for a vaccine injury.
Cathy Meehan: They know that. They know that they’re not liable for injury. So I have another little theory that because doctors will say, “Well, my patients are fine, they don’t have vaccine injury,” or they might have a few kids on the autism spectrum, or obviously they have asthma, pneumonia, all those things, but they’re not correlating that with vaccines. But I wonder how many parents actually take their child to a pediatrician, receive their schedule of vaccinations, and then at one point the parent says something like, “I really think it was the vaccinations,” and the doctor gaslights them and says, “No, it’s not.” And then the parent starts doing their own research and figuring out the probability that vaccinations actually do cause lots of problems, and the parent just removes themselves from the practice, and that doctor doesn’t see that vaccine injury like they would if they stayed there. And so that’s where I think part of these pediatricians are saying, “Well, no, vaccines are safe and effective, I don’t have problems in my practice,” because I personally believe parents are just removing their children from that practice and seeking alternative functional medicine, MAPS doctors, seeking other physicians for that practice.
Kim M. Rosenberg: I think that’s right. And I also think that where you have a parent who truly believes that their child has suffered a vaccine injury and decides they’re not vaccinating anymore, oftentimes the doctor’s office escorts them out as a patient and basically fires them as a patient, too. Absolutely. So for a different reason, they’re not seeing vaccine injury that way. And we hear over and over again about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, VAERS, that injuries can be reported to. Parents will ask doctors to report, and the doctors will refuse to report. And many parents don’t know they can self-report. It’s not the easiest system to use, but you can go in and make a report. Now, correlation doesn’t equal causation—just because you file a VAERS report doesn’t mean absolutely the injury was related. But the government is supposed to be looking at that information and doing safety analyses. Occasionally you hear of a person who was contacted by someone at CDC following a VAERS report, but oftentimes I feel like they just lay low and nothing happens with them that we know of. And there are other reporting systems that we don’t even have access to as the general public. There’s a whole architecture of reporting systems out there—Dr. Meryl Nass has spoken about this frequently. We don’t even know what’s in some of those systems because no one has ready access to them.
Cathy Meehan: Wasn’t there a database somewhere prior to Bobby Kennedy coming in as HHS secretary that no longer has access?
Kim M. Rosenberg: There’s the VSD, the Vaccine Safety Datalink. That is a conglomeration of safety data from some of the biggest HMOs in the country, and the HMOs actually own that data and share it with the government. So there are real issues there as to who gets access. There have been rare occasions where people have gotten access to the VSD, but it does not happen often. They don’t make it easy, they don’t make it pleasant to be there looking at the data. You’re very limited in what you can take in—whether you can take notes or not—so you’re supposed to just remember everything that you see. So yes, there’s that, but there are other databases as well. And again, the HMO reporting is what the HMOs are recording, and we know that the HMOs are one of the places where they really push patients through, too, and they don’t tolerate families who don’t vaccinate for the most part. Doctors get in trouble with their HMO if they have a low percentage of vaccinating patients, tied into compensation because we know there’s P4P, Pay for Performance. Aetna does it, Blue Cross Blue Shield does it. And that’s actually tied to vaccination percentages of how much you get in bonuses—the more you vaccinate, the more you’re guaranteed a bonus.
Kim M. Rosenberg: No, it all exists. You’re 100% right. And again, it’s all propped up by this lack of liability for the manufacturers and for the medical professionals, right? So why not? And as a result of that liability shield, at least in part, the number of vaccines has grown so tremendously since the 1986 Act. I mean, we went from literally a handful. I have my vaccination card from when I was a baby—I think I got measles, rubella, DTaP, and polio. And that was almost 60 years ago, everybody.
Cathy Meehan: Mine, too.
Kim M. Rosenberg: That was a long time ago. And you look at it now… So let’s get back to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. That’s 40 years ago.
Cathy Meehan: 40 years ago! Don’t remind me of that, that doesn’t make me feel old!
Kim M. Rosenberg: There was a problem with safety—and I’m just going to say safety because that’s what the whole thing we’re talking about is: injury and safety. I remember one of the first people that I met in the medical freedom fight was Maryann Puckett out of Oklahoma City, and she was just this warrior mom. Her son Stephen was in his 30s when I met her. Maryann has since passed, and she did so much for the movement in creating awareness. But this problem has existed for over 40 years. Your son is in his 20s. We have children every day that are being injured by vaccinations, period. We know that is happening, we know that has existed, and it’s got to stop. It’s got to stop. Now, what’s going to happen with the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act? Do you think that the pharmaceutical companies are ever going to have liability? And the other part of my question is: why didn’t they just make a safer product?
Kim M. Rosenberg: Because making a safer product takes time and money and research to develop that safer product. Now, they did change the pertussis component, right? Children in the early ’80s were getting whole-cell pertussis. Now they get DTaP—there’s a little small ‘a’ before the ‘P’—which theoretically may be safer. It’s also a whole heck of a lot less effective. We still see DTaP injuries, right? We still see kids being injured from that vaccine, but we also see statistics… I worked on a case in California when they removed the philosophical exemption in California about 10 years ago now, and one of the pieces of information that we found from the California Department of Health was that 90% of pertussis cases were in vaccinated individuals. You don’t hear that on the national news.
So all these people who say, “You need to be vaccinated, you need to get that shot in order to see your grandbaby, we don’t want the baby to get pertussis”—of course we don’t want the baby to get pertussis. But the other thing people don’t realize is even if let’s assume effectiveness of the vaccine just for the purpose of this conversation, it’s not like you put it in the arm and it’s immediately effective, right? It takes weeks for those antibodies to start to build up. And antibodies are not the best measure of effectiveness and protection—we know that. But it takes weeks for those antibodies to build up, yet you see people going and getting their shot and then going to visit the grandbaby right away. You’re not protected at all, even if it’s going to work for you. Yeah, it’s just this fallacy of the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines, but there’s no incentive now to make a safer product when you have no liability for it, right? So you’re not seeing changes being made to a lot of vaccines. If anything, you’re seeing with some vaccines like the pneumococcal vaccine, Prevnar—we started off with a couple of strains of the disease in the Prevnar vaccine, now I think we’re up to Prevnar 23. It’s a huge number.
Cathy Meehan: What I always say is I want people to make an informed decision. I want them to do their research, but they ultimately need to make the decision that’s right for themselves and their family. If I want the freedom not to accept a vaccine or any other medical intervention, at the same time it’s not true medical freedom if people don’t have a choice to also take it if they want it. I may not agree with their choice, but if I want them to respect my choice, I have to respect their choice. But I will do my darnedest to help educate them with resources.
Kim M. Rosenberg: Yes. A lot of it is a lot of people… You can’t just Google “is the MMR vaccine safe and effective” or ask your AI chatbot—that’s not going to get it for you. You’re going to have to seek out resources, and Children’s Health Defense is a great place for resources, by the way. Your website is an excellent place for resources, so I will point people in that direction, too. But you’ve just got to know where to find it.
Kim M. Rosenberg: You do, because search engine optimization does not put it at the top of a Google search, that’s for sure. And ChatGPT or Claude or anyone else is not going to give you all the information, though I know people who have used those AI chatbots and you can really work them till eventually they may agree with you, but it’s not going to happen on your first search of “is MMR safe and effective?”
Cathy Meehan: “Yes, it is. Of course it is.” Yeah. But what’s going to happen with the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act? How do we change that? Can we change that, or is it going to be like consumer choice, that we just stop vaccinating by choice?
Kim M. Rosenberg: That’s happening for some people, right? Some people are making that choice and seeking out non-traditional medical practices—they’re seeking out functional medicine, non-traditional ways of funding their medical care, like ministry-based organizations where people pool money to provide health care, because sometimes your insurance is pressuring you to get vaccinated, too. But there are also moves… The 1986 Act is a federal law, so it can be changed by Congress. And there are bills—Representative Gosar, Senator Paul have bills to amend the Act to make it theoretically a little bit better and maybe give people access to court if court is where they want to go. Because now what happens is you have to stay in the VICP for a certain number of days even if there’s no decision on your case, and then you can leave and file in court, but essentially the only thing left is fraud. So remedies in court have been curtailed by the U.S. Supreme Court, so you’re limited in what you can do, and fraud is not easy to prove. That’s where those court cases get really, really expensive—you’re going through a tremendous amount of discovery, expert witnesses, all adding up quickly. Lawyers often take those cases on a contingency basis, meaning they’re not getting paid upfront, but that also limits the number of cases lawyers will take because they want cases they think are going to win. And we know these vaccine cases traditionally have been very expensive and difficult.
What the Gosar and Paul bills are trying to do is make access to court easier and make it a choice for families. There was also recently a bipartisan bill introduced—a Democrat from Texas and a Republican from Pennsylvania introduced a bill that would allow people injured by COVID-19 vaccines to go to VICP instead of CICP, the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program under the PREP Act. As bad as VICP is, CICP is much worse. CICP offers a one-year statute of limitations from the date you got the shot to file, you don’t get lawyers’ fees paid, and very few cases have been compensated—it’s kind of the Medicaid of compensation programs, the payer of last resort. VICP offers better, more fair compensation, though still not a great solution because the program itself is fundamentally flawed, but it is better than being stuck in CICP for sure.
Even in VICP, where they bring in life planners and actuaries, sometimes you’re fighting over things that strip a family’s dignity—fighting over how many adult diapers a day an injured, incontinent adult child needs. There should be no argument over that. So this system has not evolved into or lived up to the hype of being non-adversarial; it is very adversarial without the tools you would have in court, like discovery, in order to fight back.
Cathy Meehan: Very sad. And just not to see what’s behind the closed doors of the pharmaceutical side. If we had that key to get in there and find out what they’re hiding or what they know… But I think they know. That’s why pharmaceutical lobbyists are the strongest lobbying group ever in history.
Kim M. Rosenberg: They’re certainly one of the strongest, for sure.
Cathy Meehan: Kim, we’re getting close to running out of time, and I’m definitely bringing you back on because there is so much more to cover and your brain is so great. But do you think pharmaceutical companies will ever have liability for injury from vaccines? Do you think it’s coming?
Kim M. Rosenberg: I hope it is coming. That’s one of the things… We’re seeing the Gosar bill and the Paul bill, but also as people become more aware of vaccine injury being real… I don’t like to think of silver linings to things like COVID, but one of the silver linings was a lot of people waking up to the reality of vaccine injury because they were seeing it more and more, and seeing it in adults or teenagers. With more vaccines being given in young adulthood and adulthood now, we’re seeing people go from being walking, talking, functioning adults to being catastrophically injured or dropping dead, God forbid. As people recognize vaccine injury, they learn that you don’t have a solution to really be compensated, or that the solution is very difficult and it’s not the entity responsible for manufacturing those products who has to pay. It’s pretty much all upside for them for vaccines on the childhood schedule.
There was a Lyme disease vaccine introduced a couple of decades ago, and there were a lot of injuries related or alleged to be related to it and lawsuits brought. The manufacturer pulled it off the market—they said not because of that, but because it wasn’t popular—but lawsuits play into any decision to stay in a market. Going back to the ’86 Act, that’s one of the reasons we have it: the pharmaceutical industry said, “We’re going to step out of the vaccine business, we’re losing too much money.”
Cathy Meehan: Don’t you wish you could go back in history and just say, “Okay, you’re out of the business,” and see what would have happened? In our dream world!
Kim M. Rosenberg: But people were looking for a solution to get compensation for families, and it was meant to be non-adversarial in theory, and that just has not been the way it developed. I would love to come back and talk about the Omnibus Autism Proceeding in the VICP, because that had such an impact on families whose children developed autism following vaccination.
Cathy Meehan: In fact, I will send you a link with a time to schedule, because we have more medical-legal matters to cover! Absolutely. Kim, you have been just a dream guest. You’re fun, you’re smart, and you have a mission. If anybody needs info, do you just point them to the CHD website? What’s your best resource?
Kim M. Rosenberg: Yes, our website is a great starting place: childrenshealthdefense.org, all spelled out. There are also books out there that are good guides—Dr. Paul Thomas has written a couple; there’s an oldie but goodie, Stephanie Cave’s What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About Childhood Vaccines; Vaccine Epidemic, of which I’m a co-editor and author, is a great resource where you can read people’s stories of vaccine injury, medical, and legal topics. And one of the things that’s really powerful on the CHD website are the people’s stories that Polly Tommey and her team have gone around the country collecting, because you hear directly from individuals impacted by what happened to themselves or their loved ones. The Vaxxed movies are another great resource. And we just released a new film called Duty to Disobey, which talks about COVID and religious exemptions from the COVID vaccine in the military, and how poorly the military treated individuals who were putting their lives on the line to protect our freedoms.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, it’s absolutely horrific what they did. Horrific. So I’m glad you guys have that documentary, because people need to know. And that’s what we’re going to do—one conversation at a time, right?
Kim M. Rosenberg: It is. It is.
Cathy Meehan: Kim, please have a blessed day. Continue your mission, and I’ll send you a link so we can join again. Okay?
Kim M. Rosenberg: Sounds good. Thank you so much for having me.
Cathy Meehan: Okay. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Kim M. Rosenberg: Bye.
