When treatment hurts

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, February 1st, 2024. This is WORLD Radio and we’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: compensation for vaccine injuries.

Doctors and public health officials insist that, generally speaking, vaccines are safe. But they acknowledge that in some cases, an individual could suffer an adverse reaction from receiving one.

REICHARD: It’s a touchy subject these days. But it’s the job of Rene Gentry to deal with vaccine injuries all day long. She’s a lawyer in Washington who is strongly pro-vaccine. Yet she specializes in representing people with vaccine injuries. Her goal is to get them the help they need to pay their medical bills.

BROWN: WORLD senior writer Emma Freire recently visited Gentry’s office and brings us the story.

STUDENT: This is I guess our certificates of or validation of our ability to practice as student attorneys in the court of federal claims.

RENE GENTRY: It’s your admission to the bar.

EMMA FREIRE: Attorney Rene Gentry is meeting with some of her students at the George Washington University Law School. Gentry has her own law firm but she’s also the director of the school’s Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic. Her office is in a red brick building located a few blocks from the White House.

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The clinic gives law students an unusual opportunity to argue cases in front of the vaccine court—just like full attorneys.

After admiring their new certificates, it’s time to get down to business.

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Gentry and the students discuss briefs, expert opinions, and upcoming hearings. It’s a complicated job. The law students are here to gain experience but they plan to work in other fields after they graduate. For Gentry, though, this is her life’s work.

GENTRY: I was actually doing immigration law on 9/11. I had an office in the Watergate and we were evacuated out of the building and immigration law shut down, and I was actually laid off at the end of that week because of it.

Through a college friend, she got a temp job collecting medical records at a vaccine injury law firm. She wound up staying there for 19 years.

GENTRY: And then the law partner, retired in January 2020. And so I went out on my own at that point.

Vaccine injury law is a small field. And it can lead to some awkward conversations when she meets new people—it seems just about everybody has an opinion.

GENTRY: Usually it takes about five questions before I will say that I'm a vaccine lawyer, just because that does trigger a lot of interesting questions.

Gentry works with a federal program called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program or VICP. It was created by Congress as part of the The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.

GENTRY: Some kids were developing seizures after a Pertussis vaccine. And they filed lawsuits against the pharmaceutical companies.

So pharmaceutical companies drastically raised the price of vaccines and threatened to stop making them altogether. To resolve the issue, Congress set up the VICP.

GENTRY: If you're injured by a covered vaccine, which are all the vaccines on the childhood vaccination schedule, you must file a claim in this program first, before you can opt out and sue a pharmaceutical company for a vaccine injury.

When the VICP was first set up, it covered 6 childhood vaccines. Gentry says cases were typically resolved in about 12 months. But over the years, Congress added more vaccines, including the annual flu shot for adults.

That led to a lot more claims. But Congress never expanded VICP’s capacity, so cases started piling up. One of the cases Gentry and her students are working on this morning was first filed in 2009.

That’s the longest delay Gentry has ever seen. But even simple cases take 4 to 5 years. And all that time, families are stuck paying their medical bills as best they can.

GENTRY: And that's particularly impactful when you have families that can't afford treatment for their child or for you know, for seniors, that they can't afford the treatment, they're not getting treatment, for seniors in particular, and there have been instances where the person has died waiting for the pendency of the case.

Gentry often finds herself providing emotional support to her clients.

GENTRY: They do struggle. And oftentimes, our clients - we’re the first people that believe them. Because it's not just the doctors, it's their family. Because families hear the same thing, right? Vaccines are totally safe. Nobody gets injured by a vaccine—a lot of time—and then you're that one person. And, you know, we're often the one that believes them first.

Gentry strongly supports vaccines. She believes a robust safety net for those injured is a critical component of a universal immunization program. And—of course— her clients are all people who got vaccinated. That’s how they got injured.

GENTRY: And I've had clients that were nurses, lifelong nurses that routinely administered vaccines in their office. But they will tell you: be reasonable. Look, if you can have an allergic reaction to an aspirin. It's anything. Vaccines are very important, but they're not magical.

Most recent discussion of vaccine injuries has focused on the COVID-19 shots. But Gentry can’t take any of those cases. That’s because the COVID-19 vaccines are covered under a different program instead of the VICP. But that program is even more overwhelmed. It’s sitting on over 9000 applications.

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Gentry is trying to help by promoting bipartisan bill HR 51-42. It would bring COVID-19 vaccine injury cases into the VICP but more than that it will also expand VICP’s capacity. That would help ensure claims are processed faster. But it’s a hard road.

GENTRY: Talking about vaccines on the Hill is like walking on the edge of a razor blade that's on fire.

But Gentry believes it has a good chance of passing—eventually.

In the meantime, she and her students will keep doing the best they can in an overburdened and dysfunctional system.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Emma Freire in Washington, D.C.

REICHARD: You can read Emma’s feature about COVID-19 vaccine injuries in the February 10th issue of WORLD Magazine. It’s also available online today, and we’ve posted a link in today’s transcript.

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