About That 4 Billion Dollars Taxpayers Have Paid for Vaccine Injuries…

Why do some folks think that taxpayers have paid 4 billion dollars in vaccine injuries and deaths?

How many doses of vaccines have been given during the time that the $4 billion was paid out? How many lives were saved because they didn’t get polio, measles, and Hib, etc.?

Oh, these folks…

About That 4 Billion Dollars Taxpayers Have Paid for Vaccine Injuries…

So, is it true?

Have taxpayers paid 4 billion dollars for vaccine injuries and deaths, like their signs say?

Nope.

For one thing, these anti-vax protestors are mixing together a couple of separate anti-vaccine talking points that are used to scare parents away from vaccinating and protecting their kids.

While the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 did set up a $0.75 vaccine excise tax to fund the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund, it is the vaccine manufacturers who pay the tax. And billions and billions of doses of vaccines (over 3.5 billion just since 2006) have been given since 1989, the time since the $4,060,857,713.42 has been paid by the Vaccine Court. The payment has been for 6,355 compensated claims over those thirty years, most of which are for vaccine injuries, not deaths. Fewer than 10% of Vaccine Court cases are for vaccine deaths.

Does that matter?

That’s about 1 compensated claim, the majority of which are settled, in about 775 thousand doses. So not quite 1 in a million…

It does if you consider that many more kids would die if we didn’t routinely vaccinate and protect our kids!

“Analyses showed that routine childhood immunization among members of the 2009 US birth cohort will prevent ∼42 000 early deaths and 20 million cases of disease, with net savings of $13.5 billion in direct costs and $68.8 billion in total societal costs, respectively.” Zhou et al on Economic Evaluation of the Routine Childhood Immunization Program in the United States, 2009

And it would be far more costly if we returned to an era when epidemics of vaccine preventable diseases became routine.

Too bad I can’t fit all of that on a sign…

More on Vaccine Court Payouts

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