Greedy Trial Lawyer
Bill Frist Busy Again
Category: Gaming The System
Bill Frist must get up every morning looking for another opportunity to immunize the drug and vaccine industry. A Register-Guard Editorial alerts us to his latest effort to slip protections for his buddies into unrelated legislation. It was a defense spending bill this time.
it's inexcusable to exploit public fears of a flu pandemic as a means to grant the drug industry unjustifiable protection against lawsuits filed by injured patients. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is attempting to slip immunity for drug and vaccine makers into a defense spending bill without debate.It's not just unseemly to concoct such a blatant Christmas giveaway for the pharmaceutical industry. Barring injured patients from seeking compensation undermines the very public health goals an effective vaccination program seeks to promote. Case in point: the Bush administration's 2003 effort to have health professionals and first-responders immunized against smallpox.
President Bush would have Americans believe that greedy trial lawyers and runaway jury verdicts have crippled vaccine makers. Hogwash. The idea that U.S. vaccine production has suffered as a result of product liability lawsuits is a Trojan horse designed to sneak the administration's tort reform agenda into must-pass public health legislation.
Here are the facts: A study of "Legal Concerns and the Influenza Vaccine Shortage" by two Harvard University School of Public Health professors found only 10 lawsuits against the manufacturers of flu vaccine during the past 20 years. Moreover, pharmaceutical companies have been making heavy recent investment in vaccine R&D without any additional liability protection.
The common-sense solution to this issue has existed since 1986. It's called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault fund that shields drug manufacturers from most lawsuits by compensating patients who can prove they were injured by a vaccine.
All Congress needs to do is extend the VIC plan to any new federal flu pandemic vaccine. That solves the problem without creating the first blanket industry product liability immunity in the nation's history.
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