1986: The Act
Directed by Dr Andy Wakefield (2020)
Film Review
1986: The Act, Dr Andy Wakefield’s* sequel to Vaxxed was just released last week. The price to rent the 2 1/2 hour film is steep – $US12.99. Some may want to wait until the price comes down. People can rent the film at https://7thchakrafilms.com/home-page
This documentary, simply, is a history of the 1986 US National Vaccine Injury Act. This legislation guarantees pharmaceutical companies totally immunity from liability for adverse reactions to vaccines by transferring the liability to US taxpayers. It also creates a special vaccine court to decide on the merit of the hundreds of disabled children who file claims every year. President Reagan (a strong opponent of big government) threatened to veto the bill. However he caved in and signed the law when Wyeth threatened to withdraw the Pertussis vaccine from the DPT (trivalent diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus vaccine).
The history of vaccine injury in the US is long, complicated and politically corrupt. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to learn the CIA was directly involved in suppressing public information about adverse vaccine side effects owing to some bizarre Cold War competition with the Soviets over vaccine supremacy (???).
It was largely due to CIA interference that 63 million Americans were injected with the cancer-causing SV40 between 1955-63 and thousands of children suffered from acute encephalopathy following inoculation with the cellular pertussis vaccine.** Available in other countries in 1981, the acellular pertussis vaccine wouldn’t be mandated for use in US infants until 1996. CIA interference is also implicated in the failure of the FDA to shut down polio vaccine production at Cutter Laboratories in 1954, after an NIH researcher discovered their vaccine contained live (as opposed to inactivated polio vaccine). Eventually 40,000 children would develop polio from the Cutter vaccine, 164 would experience paralysis and 10 would die.
1986 wasn’t the first year the US government assumed liability for vaccine injuries. In 1976 a swine flu vaccine was rushed to market with inadequate testing after four soldiers contracted swine flu at Fort Dix. When the insurance industry refused to issue liability insurance, the federal government assumed liability. In this case, 200 people caught swine flu with one death. In contrast the the vaccine caused 58 deaths, 532 cases of paralysis, and thousands of lawsuits against the US government.
The 1986 law provides that claims must be filed within three years of learning of the vaccine injury (especially onerous given most parents have never heard of the vaccine court). Hearings are closed to the public, have no discovery process and are run by a special master (as opposed to a judge). The Act initially included a table of recognized injuries (developed by the CDC) which were automatically compensated. In the beginning, regressive encepalopathy (in which seizures and autism are often a major outcome) was an on table condition, which meant 95% of autism/seizure cases received compensation.
After the incidence of autism began to skyrocket in the early 1990s, Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services removed regressive encephalopathy and many other common vaccine injuries from the CDC table. This, in turn, forced parents to prove a direct link between the vaccine and their child’s disability, which is extremely difficult as most of the research is suppressed.
The most serious downstream effect of the total immunity 1986 Act granted pharmaceutical companies is the removal of any incentive on their part to study (and guarantee) the long term safety of their vaccines.
*The mainstream media continues to crucify Wakefield for his supposedly fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper. This article probably gives the best legal synopsis of the fraudulent case Big Pharma’s concocted against him (https://www.ageofautism.com/2020/03/why-we-cannot-believe-brian-deer-about-andrew-wakefield.html).
**In 1976, the FDA commissioned a study (which was suppressed) revealing that 1 in 300 children receiving cellular pertussis vaccine developed generalized seizures, and 1 in 214 developed other serious neurological reactions.
The Most Revolutionary Act 