Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced on Oct. 8 that the National Institutes of Health has opened a clinic at its Bethesda campus “dedicated to studying and caring for patients experiencing health problems following vaccination,” and that HHS will pay physicians, through a new Medicare and Medicaid policy, for filing reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), require electronic health records to log “vaccine-related adverse events,” and “modernize” VAERS itself. “We must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries—not dismiss or gaslight them,” Kennedy said. No director, budget or timetable was given; the payment scheme requires new rules.

VAERS is a passive and unverified system to which anyone can report anything that happens (or that they claim happens) after a vaccination; a report does not itself establish a causal link, as the CDC and FDA state quite explicitly on the system’s own site. Its purpose is to flag signals to be followed up by serious study. For a quarter century, anti-vaccine activists—including Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy chaired until 2023—has pointed to the raw number of VAERS reports as if it were a count of injuries. Paying doctors per report and mandating that every post-vaccination complaint be entered into the medical record will raise that number without adding a single verified case; the new clinic, whose patients are by definition people who already believe a vaccine harmed them, will generate case series with no comparison group. Last month Kennedy spoke at a Children’s Health Defense conference, claiming that vaccines are linked to diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome, asthma and autoimmune disease.

Meanwhile the United States has recorded 4,080 measles cases this year, the most in decades, Stateline reported Oct. 9. Pennsylvania, which saw nearly 700 cases and four deaths as of mid-September, among them two infants in Lancaster County and an unvaccinated 18-year-old in Mifflin County who died of measles-induced brain inflammation, has the worst outbreak in the country, Gov. Josh Shapiro said. Shapiro has charged that Kennedy personally directed the CDC not to report the Pennsylvania deaths. Kennedy’s answer to a disease that is killing children because their parents were told vaccines are dangerous is a federal program to manufacture more reports that vaccines are dangerous.