Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday announced a drive to fund research into vaccine injuries, including a new vaccine injury clinic at the National Institutes of Health, along with a policy that would pay doctors to report suspected injuries to the federal monitoring system, CIDRAP reported.

Under the initiative, a new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services policy and billing code would reimburse physicians who report suspected vaccine-related injuries to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, known as VAERS. The Department of Health and Human Services said it is also modernizing VAERS and making it easier for doctors to file reports. The announcement gave no specifics on the clinic’s scope.

The program was introduced in a video posted to X featuring Mr. Kennedy; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director; Dr. Mehmet Oz, the CMS administrator; and Dr. Erica Schwartz, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the video, Mr. Kennedy called vaccine injury an invisible disease and said people who have suffered injuries have been marginalized and vilified. “We must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries—not dismiss or gaslight them,” he said in an HHS press release. “President Trump and I are building a health system that takes them seriously, follows the evidence, and uses what we learn to make vaccines safer.”

This is how we earn back trust in our public health institutions.

“Most important of all we are listening to the voices of people who have suffered vaccine injury so we can learn from them,” Dr. Bhattacharya said in the video. The four health leaders say repeatedly that vaccine injury patients, and parents of children they say were harmed by vaccines, will finally be heard.

The initiative arrives from a secretary with a long history of falsely linking vaccines to chronic disease, autism and even cancers. Sources told The New York Times the research clinic may investigate aluminum-containing vaccines, which have repeatedly been proven safe, CIDRAP reported. Thursday’s announcement did not contain specifics on what the clinic would study.

The push is the latest turn in Mr. Kennedy’s vaccine agenda, which earlier this fall produced an executive order rewriting the childhood immunization schedule, to protests from the doctors who built it.

A separate report, published on Wednesday by the Partnership to Fight Infectious Disease, shows how rare proven injuries are under the existing compensation system, even as that system strains to keep up. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault federal system created under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, has operated for 40 years.

Over that era, vaccines have prevented 508 million illnesses and more than one million deaths and generated $2.7 trillion in societal savings, according to the report. “Across more than 5.65 billion doses of covered vaccines distributed between 2006 and 2024, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program compensated roughly one person per million doses,” the report said. It called that figure a reflection of “both the extraordinary safety record of modern vaccines and the program’s ability to identify and compensate the rare cases where harm occurs.”

But the caseload has climbed and the money has not kept pace. More than 2,000 claims were filed in 2021, compared with 386 ten years earlier, and adjudicating a claim now takes two to three years. The report calls for reforms to speed the process and raise the $250,000 cap on injury compensation.

“Strengthening the VICP through targeted reforms is not simply a necessary matter of fairness to those injured,” the report said. “It is an investment in the policy foundation that sustains vaccine availability, drives affordability, and provides the market stability that attracts innovators and makes the next generation of vaccines worth pursuing.”

What the new reimbursements will cost, and how many more reports they will draw into VAERS, the administration did not say.