(LifeSiteNews) – Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona reintroduced legislation that would end pharmaceutical companies’ shield against liability for any potential harmful effects of the vaccines they manufacture.
“Big drug companies are making huge profits while people who are hurt by vaccines can’t get justice in court,” Gosar said, according to KAWC.
To change that, H.R.4668 is meant to “amend the Public Health Service Act to end the liability shield for vaccine manufacturers.” The current text has not yet been officially published but is expected to be substantially similar to the version he introduced last year that would allow individuals to “bring a civil action against a vaccine administrator or manufacturer in a State or Federal court for damages arising from such injury or death.”
That would eliminate the general immunity vaccine manufacturers enjoy under the federal National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 and allow for civil actions to be pursued regardless of whether a victim has filed a petition with the program.
According to details provided to Children’s Health Defense, the bill would also remove the statute of limitations for individuals seeking compensation under the previous law and eliminate the COVID-19 vaccines’ classification as “countermeasures” under the federal Public Readiness & Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005.
According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the PREP Act empowers the federal government to “limit legal liability for losses relating to the administration of medical countermeasures such as diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.” Near the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, the first Trump administration invoked the Act in declaring the virus a “public health emergency.”
Under this “sweeping” immunity, CRS explained, the federal government, state governments, “manufacturers and distributors of covered countermeasures,” and licensed or otherwise-authorized health professionals distributing those countermeasures are shielded from “all claims of loss” stemming from those countermeasures, with the exception of “death or serious physical injury” brought about through “willful misconduct,” a standard that, among other hurdles, requires the offender to have acted “intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose.”
There is a large body of evidence against the COVID vaccines, which were developed in record time by the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.
The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 38,709 deaths, 221,030 hospitalizations, 22,331 heart attacks, and 28,966 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of June 27, among other ailments. U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID vaccines, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April 2024, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines and offered several theories for a causal link.
In January, a long-awaited Florida grand jury report on the COVID vaccine manufacturers found that while only a miniscule percentage of the millions of vaccinations resulted in serious harm based on the data it had access to, such events do occur, and there are “profound and serious issues” in pharmaceutical companies’ review process, including reluctance to share what evidence of adverse events they did find.
In May, U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Marty Makary and vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad announced that there would no longer be blanket recommendations for all Americans to receive the shot, but the “risk factors” it would still be recommended for include asthma, cancer, cerebrovascular disease, chronic kidney diseases, a handful of chronic liver and lung diseases, diabetes, disabilities such as Down’s syndrome, heart conditions, HIV, dementia, Parkinson’s, obesity, smoking, tuberculosis, and more. Health & Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. subsequently announced COVID vaccines would not be recommended to healthy children or pregnant women.
However, the Trump administration approved a new mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine from Moderna last month for “individuals who have been previously vaccinated with any COVID-19 vaccine and are: 65 years and older, or 12 through 64 with at least one underlying condition that puts them at high risk for severe outcomes from COVID-19.”
In a recent interview, Makary asked for patience from those unsatisfied by the administration’s handling of the shots, insisting more time was needed for comprehensive trials to get more definitive data.
