More than 11,000 Americans say they were seriously injured by a COVID-19 vaccine. As of June 2026, exactly 60 of them have received any compensation. Not sixty percent. Not sixty thousand. Sixty people, out of eleven thousand, while the rest sit trapped in a broken emergency program that was never designed to handle what they're going through.
The Court You've Never Heard Of That Actually Works
CBS News and 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim have been digging into vaccine court, a legal forum that has been quietly doing its job for nearly four decades, and doing it well. It sits a few hundred yards from the White House. Most Americans have no idea it exists.
Here's how it works. Back in the 1980s, families of children injured by the DTP vaccine sued manufacturers in civil court and won. The drug companies responded the way corporations always respond when liability gets expensive: they left. All but one pulled out of vaccine production entirely, creating shortages and a genuine public health crisis. Congress, in a rare moment of functional bipartisanship, built a solution. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or VICP, was born.
The program is funded by a 75-cent tax on every recommended childhood vaccine dose. Cases are heard not by juries but by one of eight judges called special masters. It is a no-fault court, meaning you do not have to prove that anyone was negligent. You just have to show that, more likely than not, the vaccine caused your injury. Since the program launched in the late 1980s, around 13,000 Americans have received more than five billion dollars in payouts, according to CBS News. Drug makers get liability protection. Injured people get compensation. The vaccine supply stays stable. As compromises go, it is a genuinely elegant piece of policy.
So Why Can't COVID Vaccine Injuries Use It?
Because COVID vaccines are not on the list. That is the whole problem, stated plainly.
The VICP operates around something called the Vaccine Injury Table, which currently covers 16 immunizations, from the flu shot to the HPV vaccine. COVID-19 vaccines are not among them. Instead, they fall under the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, or CICP, a separate administrative system created under the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. The PREP Act was designed for emergencies, and the CICP reflects that. It has a one-year statute of limitations compared to VICP's three years. It does not compensate for pain and suffering. It is an administrative process, not a judicial one, which means no special masters, fewer procedural protections, and a dramatically higher bar to clear.
The results speak for themselves. As CBS News reports, more than 14,000 claims related to COVID countermeasures have been filed with the CICP. About 11,000 of those involve COVID vaccines specifically. Of those 11,000 claims, more than 7,000 have been denied. As of June 2026, only 109 have been determined eligible for compensation. And only 60 have actually been paid.
What It Takes to Move COVID Into the Real System
Legal experts interviewed by CBS News are pretty unanimous: COVID vaccines need to be added to the VICP. "Those people went out and did exactly what was asked of them to protect themselves, their communities, and their families," said Renée Gentry, a top vaccine injury litigator and director of the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at George Washington University Law School. "And they're basically being hung out to dry in the countermeasures program without any real compensation."
Moving COVID vaccines into the VICP requires three things to line up. The vaccine needs to become a recommended childhood vaccine again. Last year, the CDC's vaccine advisory committee changed its recommendations, and the CDC now recommends the COVID-19 vaccine for people over six months old based on individual decision-making rather than a universal mandate. Check, sort of. Congress then needs to pass an excise tax on COVID vaccination so the trust fund has money to pay claims. And finally, the Secretary of Health and Human Services needs to add COVID vaccines to the Vaccine Injury Table.
That last step is where things get interesting in the worst possible way. The current Secretary of Health and Human Services is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man whose entire political identity for the past decade has been built on vaccine skepticism. The guy who has to sign off on formally acknowledging vaccine injuries and bringing them into a compensation system is the same guy who spent years casting doubt on whether vaccines were safe at all. You genuinely could not script a more dysfunctional bottleneck if you tried.
A Family That Ended Up on the Right Side of the Broken System
The 60 Minutes report puts a human face on all of this through Jacob Thompson, now 13, who lives in St. Louis. Jacob can speak only a handful of words and needs help walking more than a few yards. He was a normal, developing infant until his six-month checkup, when he received the standard DTaP combination shot. Hours later, he began seizing. By age two, he was suffering up to 700 seizures in a single day and was diagnosed with a rare, severe form of epilepsy. His parents, John and Huali Thompson, became convinced that the vaccinations had triggered something.
They took their case to Renée Gentry and eventually to vaccine court. Last July, the Thompsons received a judgment of 2.1 million dollars, plus a lifetime annuity for Jacob's future care. The special master ruled it was more probable than not that the six-month vaccinations aggravated an underlying genetic mutation. Gentry is careful to note that vaccine court does not require scientific certainty, and that yes, some cases probably get compensated where the science is genuinely unclear. That is a feature, not a bug. The whole point of a no-fault system is that you lower the bar deliberately, because proving biological causation to scientific standards in a court of law is nearly impossible.
The Thompsons got something. The 60-odd COVID claimants who have been paid got something. The other 10,940 people who filed COVID vaccine injury claims have gotten nothing, or worse, a denial letter.
The Bigger Picture on COVID Vaccine Safety
Let's be clear about something, because this story will inevitably be weaponized by people who have no interest in accuracy. COVID vaccines are safe and effective. The CDC, along with every major public health organization, affirms this, and the vaccines went through rigorous clinical trials before authorization. As of May 2023, more than 676 million doses had been administered in the United States. According to the latest CDC COVIDVaxView data cited by CBS News, about 23.3 million doses of the 2025-26 COVID vaccine had been administered as of late April.
Vaccine injuries are real. They are also genuinely rare, likened by researchers to lottery odds or lightning strikes. The fact that thousands of people filed claims against a backdrop of hundreds of millions of doses is actually evidence of the program working as designed, capturing the rare outliers. What is not working is the compensation side. You can believe vaccines are safe at the population level and also believe that the small number of people who do experience serious harm deserve a fair process. Both things are obviously true. The VICP was built on exactly that logic.
The Dingo Take
Here is the tell on this whole situation. The VICP was created because Congress understood that a functional society sometimes asks people to take a small risk for the collective good, and that when those rare risks materialize into real harm, the people who got hurt deserve to be made whole. That is not a radical position. That is just basic social contract stuff. It passed with bipartisan support in 1986. Ted Kennedy cited it as a model of compassionate governance.
Now we have 11,000 people who followed public health guidance during a once-in-a-century pandemic, took a shot their government told them was safe and important, and ended up filing injury claims. The system that exists to help them is so stacked against claimants that after years of processing, sixty people have been compensated. The fix is obvious, documented, and agreed upon by legal experts. And the person with the most power to make it happen is the guy who spent years on a podcast telling people vaccines were poison. You want a perfect symbol of how thoroughly this administration has broken public health infrastructure? There it is.
The cruelest part is that this isn't even an ideological dispute. Nobody serious is arguing that COVID vaccine injuries don't happen or don't deserve compensation. The argument is just that nobody has gotten around to fixing the paperwork, the tax structure, and the table. That is the whole thing. Bureaucratic inertia and one extremely conflicted cabinet secretary are the only things standing between 11,000 Americans and a system that, by everyone's account, actually works. In a functioning government, this gets fixed in an afternoon. In this one, we are doing a 60 Minutes segment about it in 2026 and the number is still sixty.
