The Department of Health and Human Services is finally making it easier for people injured by the COVID shots to claim compensation.
HHS has agreed to build something that’s been missing since the rollout six years ago: an official table listing which injuries the government will presume were caused by the shots.
That announcement already has a legal consequence. A federal lawsuit accusing HHS of illegally failing to build the table has been put on ice while the agency follows through. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich granted a six-month stay, requested by attorney Ray Flores, after HHS revealed last month that it plans to formally propose a COVID-19 injury table this November.
What an Injury Table Actually Does
An injury table is a list of specific conditions, paired with the time window in which they have to appear after a vaccine or other countermeasure. If someone develops a listed injury inside that window, the government presumes the shot caused it. The claimant doesn’t have to prove causation from zero.
Without a table, that’s exactly what claimants are stuck doing. It’s expensive, slow, and often impossible.
According to federal filings, HHS’s table will lay out injuries that “compelling, reliable, valid, medical, and scientific evidence” shows are presumed to result from COVID countermeasures, along with the specific time window regulators will use to judge causation.
A Legal Duty HHS Ignored for Years
The underlying lawsuit, Samp v. Kennedy, argues that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the officials before him broke the law by never creating a COVID-19 injury table in the first place. The suit asks the court to declare that failure illegal and force Kennedy to act.
That legal duty comes from the PREP Act, which requires HHS to maintain an injury table to help determine who qualifies for compensation after being harmed by a covered countermeasure. Yet years into the pandemic, no such table for the COVID shots ever existed.
A Compensation System With No Court and No Trust Fund
Until now, anyone hurt by the COVID shot has had exactly one federal option: the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, or CICP. Lawyers who’ve worked with claimants call it a black hole, and once you see how it runs, it’s easy to understand why.
No dedicated trust fund. Payments depend on whatever Congress decides to appropriate from the general Treasury.
No court, no hearing. Claimants submit paperwork and medical records, and HRSA decides the outcome administratively, behind closed doors.
No lawyer required, though claimants are allowed to hire one.
A one-year filing deadline, versus three years under the standard federal vaccine injury program.
Minimal payouts. Compensation generally covers only unreimbursed medical costs and lost income — little or nothing for pain and suffering.
Almost no appeal rights.
COVID shots were never folded into the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), the no-fault system Congress built in 1986 to handle vaccine injuries. Instead, COVID claims got routed into CICP, a program designed for emergency public-health response, not for actually compensating injured people.
The results speak for themselves: of more than 14,000 COVID shot-related claims filed with CICP, only around 60 have ever resulted in payment. That’s under 1%.
The Woman Behind the Lawsuit
Erica Samp is one of the thousands who got nothing.
After receiving two doses of Moderna’s shot in 2021 under an employer mandate, Samp developed encephalopathy, lost her vision and hearing, and suffered vascular damage. Her medical bills now run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
HRSA denied her CICP claim in 2024, ruling there wasn’t enough evidence to show the shot caused her injuries directly.
She’s far from alone. More than 1.5 million adverse-event reports involving COVID shots have been filed with the government’s own reporting system — yet only a tiny fraction of CICP claimants have ever been paid. One of the biggest reasons is there was no injury table to point to.
Why This Matters Beyond the Lawsuit
If an injury is on the table and shows up inside the specified window, the government presumes the countermeasure caused it. Claimants still have to prove the injury actually happened, but they no longer have to fight to prove causation from scratch.
That could open the door for people already shut out by CICP’s one-year deadline. Under federal law, when HHS adds a new injury to a table, newly eligible people get a fresh filing window. That means some claimants who were denied — or who never filed at all because their deadline had already passed — could get a second shot at compensation.
For now, the table is still just a proposal, not final policy. But after years in which fewer than 1% of COVID shot-related CICP claims have ever been paid, it’s the first real movement toward a system where some injuries are presumed rather than something every claimant has to prove alone from zero.
And a federal court has now given HHS six months to prove it’s actually going to follow through.
The government andTaxpayers should never have been responsible for vaccine related injuries. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 gave an industry the right to injure and kill people without a penalty. if this Act had not been passed, we would not be having the trouble that we face today. Right before this Act was passed, the vaccine manufacturers were facing a slew of multi-million dollar lawsuits for deadly and defective vaccines....and our government let them off the hook. This Act must be rescinded!!
It is horrifying and disgusting that our government backed by the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry has left millions of American's injured, suffering, and gaslit.
You'd think we were a third world country.
I am astonished at the lack of leadership for basic human decency.
God Help us! 🙏