Infectious Disease
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Vaccines
— Attempts to add autism to VICP’s injury table could upend the program, vaccine advocates warn
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December 29, 2025 • 3 min read
A rushed, perfunctory end-of-year meeting by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines (ACCV) led to no recommended policy changes, but the event’s public comments foreshadowed potentially profound changes ahead in 2026.
Created in 1986, the VICP provides a no-fault alternative to traditional legal approaches to compensate people who are found to be injured by VICP-designated vaccines. The nine-member ACCV reviews VICP policies and procedures, and makes recommendations to the HHS secretary, including which conditions should be on the program’s Vaccine Injury Table.
Required to meet four times a year, the ACCV hadn’t convened at all in 2025. The panel finally met in a last-minute gathering Monday that diced four presentations into four “meetings.” The panel conducted no deliberations and took no votes at the meeting. However, public comments from health experts and lay people alike pointed to issues ahead that could make future ACCV meetings anything but pro forma.
Virtually everyone who offered public comment agreed that the VICP’s success shouldn’t preclude changes. Opinions diverged, however, over what those changes should be.
The VICP was “intended to offer a less-burdensome process for petitioners to seek compensation for vaccine injuries,” noted Allison Hill, PharmD, director of professional affairs at the American Pharmacists Association. While it succeeded, Hill called for “long-overdue updates” such as expanding the VICP to include all adult vaccines; moving COVID-19 vaccines from the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program to the VICP; and ensuring timely implementation of excise taxes paid by vaccine makers for newly recommended vaccines. The VICP’s trust fund is paid for through such excise taxes.
Hill took aim at efforts by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others to potentially broaden the VICP’s Vaccine Injury Table to include autism diagnoses. “Renewed efforts to link vaccines to autism are unfounded and dangerous,” she said. “Adding this disproven claim to the Vaccine Injury Table would threaten the solvency of the VICP and contradict decades of scientific evidence showing no causal link between vaccines and autism.”
In another public comment, a parent of a child with autism countered that by saying a link between vaccines and autism was supported by the CDC’s website, which was revised in November. The new CDC website says “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
“Why should I have to prove to the VICP what the CDC and HHS now say can’t be proved?” the parent said. “This puts the VICP in an adversarial relationship with parents of children with autism.”
In a reminder likely meant for a wider audience than the panel, Dorit Reiss, PhD, a vaccine legal expert at UC Law San Francisco, emphasized that any recommended changes from the ACCV must follow rules before becoming policy.
“I look forward to the changes you might propose to improve the program in future meetings … and to participating in the lengthy rulemaking process — with the required 180 days for those changes to be made,” Reiss said. “I hope members keep in mind that, right now, the most important and urgent changes the program needs have to be made by Congress.”
Among the changes Reiss recommended: adding more special masters to review cases, updating award caps, increasing the statute of limitations on claims, adding an excise tax for COVID-19 vaccines to allow them into the VICP, and clarifying that shared decision-making vaccines are also included under the VICP.
While Kennedy replaced all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, none of the ACCV members were replaced in 2025. Currently, there are no scheduled ACCV meetings in 2026.
