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A lawsuit filed Tuesday seeks to strike down the PREP Act — the federal law that granted legal immunity to companies such as Pfizer and Moderna for injuries caused by their COVID-19 vaccines and other COVID-19 countermeasures.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Tampa Division, alleges the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act violates the U.S. Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.
Plaintiffs in the suit include the nonprofit Moms for America and individual plaintiffs who were injured by a COVID-19 vaccine, or whose loved one suffered injury or death from a COVID-19 vaccine.
According to the complaint, “This case is about the government’s failure to resolve conflicts involving Americans killed or grievously harmed while receiving healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Defendants are the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and President Joe Biden.
“As even The New York Times has recently acknowledged,” Jeff Childers, attorney for the plaintiffs, told The Defender, “too many Americans have been injured by the COVID vaccines and other rushed treatments, and now have no recourse, no help and no support. They can’t sue anybody, thanks to PREP.”
“PREP was poorly conceived, badly executed, and gave far too much power to unelected bureaucrats and executive agencies,” he added.
Childers wrote on Substack today that the PREP Act should “be crushed and burned to a cinder in the incinerator of history’s worst ideas.”
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the PREP Act unconstitutional and to declare that the HHS secretary’s actions in implementing the act violate the Administrative Procedure Act.
The suit also asks the court to declare that the plaintiffs can sue companies like Pfizer and Moderna in federal and state courts. It also seeks compensation for attorney fees.
COVID revealed how bad PREP Act is for Americans
In 2005, Congress passed the PREP Act in a defense appropriations bill after then-President George W. Bush gave a “passionate speech about the nation’s lack of preparation for biowarfare and pandemics,” Childers told The Defender.
The PREP Act authorizes the HHS secretary to declare that “a disease or other health condition or other threat to health constitutes a public health emergency.” It also grants a “covered person” immunity from legal liability for all claims for loss relating to the administration or use of “countermeasures,” such as drugs, biological products, medical devices and vaccines.
“Before COVID,” Childers said, “it was barely used.”
Kim Mack Rosenberg, general counsel for Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender the COVID-19 pandemic has “shined a bright light” on the PREP Act.
“I think it is safe to say,” she said, “most Americans had no idea that as COVID vaccines were developed and rolled out at ‘warp speed’ — and in many instances mandated or taken by individuals based on fear-mongering — and as medications such as remdesivir were forced on many patients, that if they were harmed or died as a result of these interventions they would be essentially left with no remedy.”
The PREP Act set up the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) court where those injured by COVID-19 countermeasures can bring their claims.
Injuries related to vaccines that are not considered countermeasures to a public health emergency are handled by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and its court, according to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.
Childers called the CICP court an “unconstitutional shadow court” in which “a secret bureaucracy denies 99% of claims and awards the ‘lucky few’ with pennies on the dollar.”
As of June 1, CICP had received 13,773 claims and issued decisions for only 3,363 of those claims. The program denied 3,271 of the claims.
Thirteen of the claims awarded were for injuries suffered from a COVID-19 vaccine. Less than $10,000 was awarded for each of the claims, with the total payout for all 13 claims amounting to less than $50,000.
“In other words,” he said, “PREP cuts normal Constitutional courts out of the process, replacing them with a poor, unconstitutional substitute.”
PREP has already done “massive damage,” Childers said, “by turning normal commercial incentives inside-out and deleting due process.”
He added, “We must get help to millions of people discarded by the system, and prevent this disaster from ever happening again.”
The Florida lawsuit calls out CICP’s “breathtakingly short” one-year statute of limitations for:
“Injuries caused by unknown, unknowable, and non-existent vaccine products and technologies. Even to receive program compensation, the Act requires causation to be proved based on established science for those same novel products and technologies. Most medical studies take years to conduct, be drafted, be peer-reviewed, and to be published. It is irrational to believe that a person taking a covered countermeasure could possibly have access to published medical/scientific studies within the one-year statute of limitation.”
Lawsuit is 1 of 3 suits challenging PREP Act
Childers’ lawsuit is one of three active cases challenging the PREP Act, according to attorney Ray Flores who on May 31 filed a separate lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), which oversaw the development and distribution of the drug under Operation Warp Speed.
In addition to the suits filed by Childers and Flores, attorney Aaron Siri in October 2023 sued HHS and other government agencies on behalf of React19 — an advocacy group whose 36,000-plus members were injured by the COVID-19 vaccines — and eight vaccine-injured individuals.
Flores told The Defender, “The PREP Act and the Department of Defense’s Operation Warp Speed are indeed acts of war on our own — hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, violations of the Nuremberg Code, and essentially no monetary recourse for their experimenting on humanity at large.”
Flores added, “I applaud Mr. Siri and Mr. Childers for raising awareness with the public, with the courts, on Capitol Hill and in the press.”
When the Defender reached out to HHS for comment on the lawsuit, an HHS spokesperson who chose to remain anonymous said the agency cannot comment on ongoing litigation.
The Defender reached out to the White House for comment on the suit but did not receive a response by deadline.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.
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