Daniel Payne , 2025-04-15 17:18:00
WASHINGTON — Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he plans to roll out changes to the vaccine injury monitoring system that would automate and increase data collection as well as look for negative impacts of the shots.
Reforming the current Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System has long been part of Kennedy’s agenda to raise questions about the safety of immunizations that are currently in use. While the general idea of improving the system is uncontroversial, Kennedy has exaggerated the extent to which side effects of vaccinations go unrecorded, according to researchers.
“It’s outrageous that we don’t have a surveillance system that functions,” he said at a Make America Healthy Again event in Indiana, noting that the agency would add datasets to study the effects of vaccinations.
“We’re going to find out what contribution vaccines and everything else — mold, [electromagnetic fields], food, all of these other exposures [that] began in the late 1980s — which one of those are the culprits? I suspect we’re going to see that there’s a lot of culprits, but we need to know.”
Kennedy didn’t make clear what he believes vaccines and other possible “culprits” are causing. Earlier in the event, he suggested a main goal of his leadership was to better understand and reverse the rise of chronic conditions including autism and diabetes. Last week, Kennedy announced an effort to understand the causes of rising rates of autism.
Kennedy on Tuesday repeated the claim that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a study in 2010 that found the current vaccine injury reporting system tallied just 1% of injuries from shots.
An analysis conducted for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality from 2006 to 2009 found that using an automated system could lead to more suspected adverse events being flagged to doctors. They estimated that fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported, but that figure includes side effects such as a sore arm or redness at the injection site.
Kennedy also cited the study in one of his organization’s books. An author of the study previously told STAT that the way Kennedy characterized it was “misleading.”
Kennedy argues in his book “Vax-Unvax” that injury data should be automated, saying the current system is inadequate. Kennedy recently told NewsNation that he would create a division at the CDC that would focus on vaccine-related injuries.
On Tuesday, he said he would move to implement an automated system as well as seek to create data sharing arrangements globally on vaccine use and health.
“They had, at that time [of the AHRQ study], a machine counting system that they were going to roll out to all the HMOs, and they put it on a shelf,” he said. “We are going to roll that out.”
The Biden administration also advocated for more tracking around vaccine injuries but didn’t question the safety of approved shots.