We recently received a couple of links from old friends that we thought we’d pass along.  Decades ago, Bexis and some of our other bloggers worked with Peter Grossi – then a senior partner at Arnold & Porter – defending fen-phen cases in Philadelphia and elsewhere.  Peter is retired now, but he still teaches law part time at UVA.  And he is still thinking important thoughts.

He recently sent us an SSRN link to his forthcoming law review article, “An Outline on How Adding Autism to the National Vaccine Compensation Program Would Likely Destroy It,” which validates – with hard numbers – something Bexis always suspected:  that attempts to add “autism” to the Vaccine Act’s vaccine injury table, using the same junk science that already failed under the Act would really be an effort to bankrupt the Act’s compensation system altogether.  Here’s an excerpt from Peter’s abstract:

Secretary Kennedy and his colleagues at HHS/CDC may soon officially declare that one or more of the childhood vaccines cause autism.  This article outlines the impact of such a sea-change on the docket, and then the very survival, of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) − a federal “no fault” system which Secretary Kennedy has long opposed as a brake on state tort litigation.

Using CDC data (published before Secretary Kennedy’s appointment), we show that the number of “profound” autism claims that could immediately be filed in the VICP would exceed the total number of all claims processed by the Program for all injuries from all vaccines over the Program’s entire 40-year history.  And that massive number of new claims will then bankrupt the Program.

By all means, read the entire article.

Our second link is from the Blog’s co-founder, Mark Herrmann, now also retired.  He still writes semi-regularly for another blog, “Above the Law.”  His latest piece is entitled, “Does Tylenol Give Mass Tort Defense Lawyers A Headache?”  It also points out something that we’ve been wondering about – “Where do mass tort defense lawyers stand now?”  Many in the prescription medical product liability litigation defense bar “were hardcore Republicans.”  But with Republicans orchestrating the administration’s recent theater of the absurd concerning Tylenol and discredited autism claims, how can we defend that?

Might now be the time to break your inherited allegiance to the Republican Party and move on to sanity?

Doesn’t Tylenol, at long last, give you a headache?

Again, read the entire post here.