Legal News

Vaccine Court (Yup, Vaccine Court) Rules Boosters Didn?t Trigger Autism

By Suzanne Sataline

Consider us enlightened. We had no idea that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., had set up a special “vaccine court” to hear evidence over whether childhood vaccines triggered autism.

But indeed it has (more on that below). And today that court issued rulings likely to raise controversy. Three special court masters ruled that childhood vaccines had not triggered autism in children and rejected the requests by parents who claimed they were eligible for federal compensation. The decisions, as reported in the WaPo and NYT, battered a grass-roots movement that has insisted that childhood vaccines caused the surge in autism cases in the United States in recent decades. Click here for a further breakdown by the WSJ’s Health Blog.

Thursday’s decisions rejected the theory that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (the so-called MMR vaccine), when combined with preservatives in other vaccines, was responsible for the onset of autism. The preservative — called thimerosal — hasn’t been used in common childhood vaccines for several years, with the exception of some flu shots. The families had applied to a federal program set up in the 1980s to compensate people who could prove they were injured by certain vaccines.

And so what of this vaccine court? According to the Court of Federal Claims’s Web site, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 set up a compensation scheme whereby those “allegedly suffering injury or death as a result of the administration of certain compulsory childhood vaccines may petition the federal government for monetary damages.” The court, established to bypass the “often costly and lengthy civil arena of traditional tort litigation,” is run by the congressionally-created Office of Special Masters, which currently consists of one chief special master and seven associate special masters who are appointed to serve for four year terms.”

So there you go. If you read this far, you probably learned something today. Feel free to bring it up at the dinner-table tonight. You don’t even need to cite us.

Photo: Getty Images

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that a preservative in the MMR vaccine itself was alleged to have triggered autism.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 12, 2009 (boomark / email).