In an interview with The Defender, Wayne Rohde, author of “The Vaccine Court 2.0: Revised and Updated: The Dark Truth of America’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program,” explained how the program protects government agencies and corporations, not vaccine-injured children.
Wayne Rohde knows what it’s like to have a child injured by a vaccine — his son was diagnosed with an encephalitic brain injury at 13 months old, after getting the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
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The author of “The Vaccine Court 2.0: Revised and Updated: The Dark Truth of America’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program” (2021) sat down with The Defender to discuss how the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has evolved — or devolved — in the last two decades to protect government agencies and corporations rather than the health of vaccinated children.
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The VICP, which came to be known as “the vaccine court,” was established in 1988 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to compensate individuals and families of individuals injured by covered childhood vaccines.
It has drawn fire for its highly adversarial process and its decisions regarding what injuries it would compensate, including its refusal to recognize autism as a potential vaccine injury.
Rohde, a co-founder of Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota and the Autism Advocacy Coalition of Minnesota, became involved in vaccine safety and compensation issues because of a vaccine injury to his son Nicholas in 1998.
Nick and his fraternal twin brother, Austin, were born in October 1997, 10 days apart. Rohde said of their birth:
“They were a little bit premature, so we had to keep them in what they call the NICU [neonatal intensive care unit] for a month or so, and then we brought them home. But they quickly progressed, reaching all their developmental milestones at the age of 12 months — size, weight, actions, speech, everything — at 12 months they were there.”
In the boys’ 13th month, Rohde and his wife, Robyne, took them to the pediatrician for their first set of vaccinations, having chosen not to do any newborn vaccinations while the twins were in the NICU.
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“Nick had a severe reaction to the MMR vaccine and we went through a period of about two weeks of solid crying, screaming, vomiting, diarrhea, high temperatures and everything … then he began to settle down from that.
“We also noticed that he arched his back quite a bit from the reaction so we know that he was having a severe reaction.”
Then Nick was diagnosed with an encephalitic brain injury, Rohde said.
“Over a period of probably two years from then,” said Rohde, “he began the slow regressive journey of losing his speech, his ability to communicate or play socially with his brother and wanting to be isolated and do his own thing.”
“My wife suspected that there were some issues with the vaccination,” Rohde added. “But the pediatrician told us, ‘No — Einstein didn’t speak until he was 5 years old.’ But Nick had already been speaking when he suffered the injury.”
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Robyne began researching vaccine injuries and discovered the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) — a group co-founded by Barbara Loe Fisher, one of the parents who first lobbied Congress to pass the VICP in 1986.
Through the NVIC, the Rohdes made contact with attorney Clifford Shoemaker, who specialized in vaccine injury. . . “Man, you guys got a great case for encephalopathy and vaccine injury, except you have one problem.”
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“You only have three years from the onset of symptoms to file,” said Rohde, “and we were already [at] three years, nine months — we were past it, so that was really frustrating for us, so we said, ‘Well, what do we do?’”
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In 2010, Rohde contacted attorney Mary Holland, a vaccine injury advocate and current president of CHD — and other vaccine injury advocates including Robert Krakow, Louis Conte and Lisa Colin, who were then writing a scholarly legal paper, “Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.”
Published in 2011, the paper reviewed the decisions of the VICP in regard to autism injury cases.
The authors analyzed the decisions of the VICP in its unprecedented “omnibus” review in 2002 of more than 5,000 petitions filed by families claiming vaccines caused their children’s autism.
Holland and her co-authors wrote, “The VICP dismissed all the ‘test case’ claims of vaccine-induced autism, and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld all the decisions on review.”
In essence, this decision established the legal precedent that vaccines do not cause autism.
But Rohde agreed with the paper’s conclusion that “despite apparent judicial clarity and finality in these decisions, significant questions remain.
According to the paper:
“Are the cases of ‘autism’ that the VICP rejected in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding really different from the cases of ‘encephalopathy’ and ‘residual seizure disorder’ that the VICP has compensated before and since? Is it possible the VICP rejected cases of ‘autism’ because of the hot-button label and not because of real differences in injuries or evidence?
“This preliminary study suggests that the VICP has been compensating cases of vaccine-induced encephalopathy and residual seizure disorder associated with autism since the inception of the program.
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Rohde said, “I spent the next three years interviewing over 285 families about their experiences with the VICP, and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to put this together in a book, because people need to know about this,’ and so by 2014, I published the first book about the VICP, ‘The Vaccine Court: The Dark Truth of America’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.’”
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In researching the original and the revised edition, Rohde discovered that successive secretaries of HHS were in violation of the law by failing to publicize the program to make parents aware of their options if they believed their child was injured by a vaccine.
“All the secretaries of HHS going all the way back to 1988 refused to publicize it,” he said. “They would not out of fear … if the public knew this was there, people wouldn’t vaccinate their children.”
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Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/truth-americas-vaccine-court/?
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