Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials have opened a new clinic to treat patients with vaccine injuries and announced other new developments on Oct. 8 that they say will change how the government handles reports of health problems following vaccination.
The new National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinic is located on the agency’s campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It was opened on Oct. 5, officials disclosed on Thursday. Reporters were not invited to the opening.
The Make America Healthy Again Commission, led by Kennedy, recommended in 2025 starting a new vaccine injury research program at the NIH as part of an effort to investigate vaccine injuries with better data collection and analysis.
The clinic is “dedicated to developing the science of preventing vaccine injuries, making vaccines safer, and most important of all, listening to the voices of people who have suffered vaccine injury, so that we can learn from them and learn from their experience to make vaccines safer,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH’s director, said in an Oct. 8 video statement.
NIH doctors and researchers will use the clinic to evaluate patients, identify potential causes of health problems, and try to figure out the best treatments, the Department of Health and Human Services, which Kennedy leads and is the NIH’s parent agency, said in a statement.
Some NIH researchers studied patients with alleged or confirmed COVID-19 vaccine injuries during the pandemic, but received pushback from NIH leadership. Patients said they were later abandoned by the researchers.
Kennedy, who attended the opening of the clinic, said in a video he posted on Thursday that parents of children who suffered injuries from vaccines, and other individuals with vaccine injuries, “have been marginalized, vilified, demonized, and gaslighted, and they have not received the medical attention they need, and we have not done the studies that need to be done to understand who’s vulnerable to those kind of injuries.”
That’s changing with the Trump administration, he added later.
“I think it was the first time in years that the vaccine-injured have been heard by the health authorities,” Brianne Dressen, who was injured by the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, treated at the NIH in 2021, and co-founded a group called React19 representing people hurt by vaccines, told The Epoch Times.
“It is definitely a step in the right direction,” added Dressen, who attended the opening.
Other Developments
Health officials also announced three other related developments on Thursday.
Kennedy has said that vaccine surveillance systems the government utilizes, including the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), don’t work well. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, another agency under Kennedy’s purview, in August solicited bids for a contract to overhaul VAERS, and on Sept. 28 awarded a new contract.
Another move, officials said, will be requiring electronic health records moving forward to include vaccine-related health issues, “so that this information can follow patients across the health care system” and inform health care professionals who are caring for the patients.
Finally, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, another health agency division, is proposing reimbursing doctors for time they spend submitting reports to VAERS.