Federal health officials have released more details about a new center for people injured by vaccines, including, for the first time, how interested individuals can sign up to be considered for research studies.
The new center in Maryland, announced earlier in the month, “will bring together patients, physician-scientists, and laboratory researchers to investigate health problems following vaccination and infections, and turn discoveries into better care and safer vaccines,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Dr. John Powers III, acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a joint Oct. 19 statement.
Goals of the center include understanding how vaccination or infection may have contributed to health problems, studying factors that may make people more vulnerable to vaccine injuries or post-infection issues such as so-called long COVID, and figuring out the best treatments for problems participants are experiencing.
The NIH is finalizing a protocol for a study that will include people who visit the new center, with an initial enrollment of several hundred people who are “experiencing the most serious adverse effects following vaccination or long-term symptoms post-infection,” Bhattacharya and Powers said. The NIH aims to launch the study before the end of the year.
People who are interested in enrolling can call 800-411-1222 or email ccopr@nih.gov.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials disclosed on Oct. 8 that they had opened the center on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, close to Washington. The opening happened several days earlier and was not open to the media. Officials had not released details about how people could enroll or whether the clinic had begun accepting patients.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request to tour the facility and speak to doctors there.
Bhattacharya, who became the NIH’s director in 2025 after time outside the government, has been critical of how people who suffer problems after vaccination are handled and has said it is important that those people are acknowledged and treated.
The people “deserve to be heard, taken seriously, and evaluated with the best tools science can offer,” he and Powers said on Monday.
Some organizations praised the clinic and other steps Kennedy announced, including an overhaul of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
“For years, vaccine injury was relegated to the backseat, VAERS data was regarded as unreliable, and doctors who viewed vaccine injury as a serious concern were marginalized,” Dr. Joseph Varon, president and chief medical officer of the Independent Medical Alliance, said in a statement.
“Secretary Kennedy and his team deserve real credit for prioritizing vaccine injury with the policy changes and tangible resources desperately needed to help those injured. And the fact is, without Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, these changes would not have happened.”