Why the COVID vaccine isn't part of an injury compensation court
A federal court compensates people who say they were injured by vaccines. Here is why the COVID vaccines are not currently part of it.
Updated on: July 26, 2026 / 7:00 PM EDT / CBS News
From inoculations against polio and smallpox to protections from measles and tetanus, vaccines are critical health care tools that have saved more than 150 million lives in the past 50 years.
Rarely, they can also have side effects.
This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Jon Wertheim reports on vaccine court , a little-known legal forum that has, for almost four decades, been compensating Americans who say they were injured by vaccines. Whether a person developed chronic arthritis after receiving an MMR vaccine or a shoulder injury resulting from a misplaced tetanus shot, the vaccine court is intended to provide an efficient way to compensate claimants without overwhelming vaccine makers with legal fees.
But for the more than 11,000 people who say they were injured after receiving a COVID vaccine, finding compensation is currently a little more complicated.
In the 1980s, there was a public health scare over the DTP vaccine, an older version of today's DTaP. At that time, families who said their children had been injured by the vaccine successfully sued the drug manufacturers in civil court. This caused all but one of those drug companies to stop production of the DTP vaccine.