Rfk Jr. Adviser: We’re Trying To Get Kids With Autism Into Vaccine Injury Program

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his staff are working on policy changes that would sweep children with autism spectrum disorder into a federal program that compensates people for alleged vaccine injuries, an adviser said Thursday.

Changes to the list of compensated injuries in the 1990s has made it nearly impossible for children with encephalopathy — a broad term for brain dysfunction — to win awards through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, Drew Downing, a vaccine injury lawyer who now serves as a senior adviser to Kennedy, said at an autism discussion hosted by the MAHA Institute. The group backs the secretary’s agenda.

“Part of what Secretary Kennedy is doing right now — and with my help, and we have a team looking at it — is we have to figure out a way to capture these kids,” Downing said.

“If you don’t want to use the ‘A word,’ whatever, that’s fine,” he said, referring to autism. “How do we capture them: do we broaden the definition of encephalopathic events? Do we broaden neurological injuries? How do we do that?”

Public health experts and program lawyers have warned that adding autism to the compensation program would exhaust the court's workforce and financial resources. VICP currently has about $4 billion on hand.

Downing didn’t provide more details, but Kennedy made similar complaints about compensation for brain dysfunction in a July interview with the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“What we’re going to try to do is to make sure that the parents who do get injured get compensation, that they get it very quickly, and they get it without the kind of adversarial impediments that have now been erected over the past 40 years,” Kennedy said.

Downing recalled his experience around the omnibus autism proceedings in the 2000s — a multi-year effort by a federal court to manage more than 5,000 claims filed by families arguing certain vaccines caused their children’s autism. The court’s special masters ruled against compensation in all cases, finding the science didn’t support their arguments.

“Since that time, autism is the ‘A word’ that you're not allowed to utter within the vaccine program realm because you will be vilified, as you guys know,” Downing said.

“But autism is simply a collection of symptoms — collection of symptoms that place someone on a spectrum of neurological disease” that can be caused by “any number of things,” he added.