A leading anti-vaccine activist is petitioning the Department of Health and Human Services to add more than 300 conditions to a table used for vaccine injury compensation claims — and is threatening to sue the agency if it doesn’t.
Why it matters: The effort is led by vaccine-injury lawyer Aaron Siri, a longtime ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was invited to brief a vaccine advisory committee in December on the childhood immunization schedule.
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/25/hhs-pressed-to-expand-vaccine-injury-table
WASHINGTON, March 25 (Reuters) – An anti-vaccine group aligned with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is petitioning him to vastly broaden a federal list to include more than 300 injuries it says are linked to immunizations, and has threatened to sue if he does not.
The petition, dated March 20, calls for amendments to the Vaccine Injury Table, which currently lists 47 potential vaccine-related injuries. It enables expedited compensation for claimants without proving a vaccine actually caused their health issue if their symptoms match those on the list.
The petition includes a 60-day notice of intent to sue if Kennedy does not begin the process of amending the table.
The Informed Consent Action Network, part of the Kennedy-led Make America Healthy Again movement and founded by Kennedy’s former presidential campaign communications director Del Bigtree, based its petition on government-commissioned reports that evaluated adverse events associated with vaccines.
The reports did not establish vaccine causation for most injuries, but the petition argues that the government’s commissioning of the studies, in which it uses the word “associated” or says there is “some basis” to believe there is a causal link suffices under the legal standard for adding to the table, which says injuries “associated” with vaccines.
CRITICISM OF PETITION
Scientific and legal experts said the petition stretched legal definitions and would hamper future government research into vaccine injuries.
Noel Brewer, a public health professor at the University of North Carolina and a former member of a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent panel of outside vaccine experts, dismissed the reasoning as flawed.