The Vaccine Court (2014)

By Wayne Rohde - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

The government’s own pediatric neurologist filed two contradictory expert reports on the same question. Dr. Andrew Zimmerman’s first opinion, declaring no scientific basis for any connection between MMR or thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism, was entered into evidence against Michelle Cedillo, Yates Hazlehurst, Colten Snyder, and indirectly against the 5,500 families folded into the Omnibus Autism Proceeding. His second opinion, concluding that vaccinations had triggered “regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder” in Hannah Poling, was used to quietly concede her case in November 2007. Wayne Rohde’s The Vaccine Court (2014) documents this sequence from the court record itself: Department of Justice attorney Vincent Matanoski handled both proceedings, the contradiction was never disclosed to the families whose cases were being dismissed, the Poling concession was sealed, and the Cedillo and Hazlehurst dismissals were public.

Rohde is the father of a child with autism. The book’s dedication names his son Nicholas as the inspiration for the author’s autism advocacy. The work that produced the book occupied three years of his life: interviewing families who had filed petitions with the NVICP, reading 2,900-page hearing transcripts, filing Freedom of Information Act requests to HRSA, the Department of Justice, and the CDC, and tracking published special master decisions across two decades of program operation. He does not foreground professional credentials. The book’s weight rests on primary documents he reproduces: Rule 4-C reports, special master orders, court transcripts, congressional testimony, GAO findings, IRS statute. He works as an investigator rather than as a theorist.

By 2014 the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program had been operating for twenty-eight years. Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986 in response to the DPT vaccine litigation crisis, with manufacturers threatening to leave the vaccine market unless they received liability protection. Parents were promised a no-fault program that would be “fair, quick, and generous.” Three years before Rohde’s book appeared, the Supreme Court ruled in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth Labs that injured parties could no longer exit the program and sue manufacturers directly. The OAP test case dismissals had come down in February 2009. The remaining autism petitions were being systematically shut down through 2011 and 2012. Less than a month before the book went to press, on January 28, 2014, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the compensation awards already entered for Jordan Harris and Ned Snyder, both injured following DTaP. The architecture documented in the book had finished installing itself.

The Vaccine Court sits adjacent to the terrain canon rather than within it. It accepts the establishment’s framing of disease causation. Its contribution is institutional: a documented map of the legal and financial architecture that allows pharmaceutical poisoning to proceed without manufacturer accountability and without honest public accounting. The full summary unpacks the $0.19 of every $0.75 excise tax routed away from the trust fund and into the US General Treasury under IRS Section 9602(b); the 1995 removal of Residual Seizure Disorder from the Vaccine Injury Table by HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, which dismissed pending DPT seizure claims and barred future ones; and the documented use of the SCN1A “genetic” diagnosis to vacate compensation awards already granted to Jordan Harris and Ned Snyder. The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund paid an average death award of $2,082,035. The vaccine court caps death at $250,000.

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