Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is desperately scrambling to defend the legal shield that protects vaccine makers from liability, as growing reports of mRNA-linked heart attacks raise concerns about vaccine-related car and air crashes.
In a Tuesday interview with CNBC, Bourla warned that if vaccine makers can be sued for the damage they have caused, “anyone can create a demand that the accident in a car happened because of a vaccine.”
When pressed on why vaccine manufacturers need liability protection if their products are truly “safe and effective,” Bourla admitted that convincing a jury otherwise could come down to a “flip of a coin.”
Bourla told CNBC that if Pfizer’s vaccines aren’t safe and effective, “we’ll never get approval from the FDA and other health authorities,” which he said are “very strict.”
However, the Pfizer CEO failed to explain why his company’s vaccines are still being distributed under emergency use authorization, meaning they have never undergone full, long-term safety testing in the U.S.
Bourla also said he disagreed with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s statement that “We don’t have any good safety studies on almost any of the vaccines and specifically on the COVID vaccines … and that is a crime.”
However, Bourla said he is focused on his points of agreement with Kennedy and President Donald Trump and on “what we can do together outside of the vaccines.” He hopes to partner with the administration to “make America healthy again,” he said.
Bourla’s comments come two days before a planned meeting between Trump and the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbying group, PhRMA, set for Thursday. Bourla is the group’s incoming chairman.
CHD report: Under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, vaccine makers are protected from liability for injuries associated with all vaccines listed on the CDC childhood vaccine schedule.
The law makes it extremely difficult to sue vaccine makers for injuries caused by their vaccines. Instead, people injured by vaccines can seek compensation through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, also known as the “Vaccine Court.”
While the program has paid out more than $5 billion to people injured by vaccines on the childhood schedule — evidence that vaccines can and do cause harm — it only accounts for a fraction of the injuries that people have experienced.
For vaccines and other drugs, called “covered countermeasures,” created in response to a public health emergency — like the COVID-19 vaccine and Paxlovid, another Pfizer product — drugmakers are protected by a different law: the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness, or PREP, Act.
Compensation under the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) set up by the PREP Act, is even more difficult to access. Of the over 13,500 claims for COVID-19 countermeasures injuries filed with the CICP, only 20 had been compensated as of December 2024, with a total payout of $439,704.35. Most of that money went to a single myocarditis claim for $370,376.
For decades, liability for vaccine makers has gone largely unquestioned, except by the families of children injured by vaccines struggling for compensation and more recently, people injured by the COVID-19 vaccine.
Widespread public dissatisfaction with the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated distrust of public health agencies and raised questions about the liability shield for vaccines in general and the COVID-19 vaccines specifically.
Even reporters in the mainstream media, like the CNBC reporters, are asking questions.
