Encephalopathy redefinition
Diagnosis ploy  Litigation 

"Under the 1986 law, DHHS was supposed to produce information brochures describing each vaccine's benefits and risks so doctors could educate parents before vaccination of their children took place.  We worked for several years with DHHS on these brochures but DHHS eventually got an amendment to the law to reduce the brochures to a one page information sheet that does not contain enough information to adequately inform parents about vaccine risks or how to monitor their child following vaccination for signs that a reaction is occurring.........Today, the bitter truth is that, although more than one billion dollars has been paid out to some 1,000 families whose loved ones have been harmed by vaccines, three out of four vaccine victims are turned away..........And to make it easier for compensation to be denied to vaccine injured children, under rule making authority these federal agencies gutted the Table of Compensable Events in 1995 and arbitrarily rewrote the definition of encephalopathy (brain dysfunction) that had been used by medicine decades......   We tried to stop the destruction of the Table of Compensable Events by bringing suit in federal court, but we lost. So, today, almost no cases of brain damage following DPT vaccination are presumed to be caused by the vaccine. The vaccine injury compensation program has been turned into the trial we were promised it would not be, where causation in fact must be proven in almost every case and vaccine victims and their lawyers are left begging for compensation from federal health agencies holding all the cards. The federal compensation system that we were told would be "simple justice for children," has become a cruel joke, a sad commentary on a national health policy that forces children to take the risk and then leaves many families to cope with the catastrophic consequences on their own when the risk turns out to be 100 percent."--Barbara Loe Fisher

"Encephalopathy was redefined so that the diagnosis requires as a sine qua non in excess of 24 hours of a diminished level of consciousness, a criterion which is far more restrictive than that of the leading epidemiological study of pertussis vaccine injury, the British National Childhood Encephalopathy Study (NCES). Moreover, seizures have been removed from the Table, although that the pertussis vaccine can cause seizures is uncontested (and warned in the manufacturer’s package insert)."--Marcel Kingsbourne

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