DeLauro Offers Amendment to Repeal Liability Protection for Vaccine Manufacturers

DeLauro Offers Amendment to Repeal Liability Protection for Vaccine Manufacturers

"Says Frist provision inoculated drug companies from the threat of legal liability, instead of inoculating the American public from a deadly strain of flu"

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn.-3) today offered an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2006 Supplemental Appropriations bill during floor consideration of the bill to repeal liability protection for vaccine manufacturers. The amendment strikes a provision of law that protects medical vaccine and antiviral makers such as companies producing avian flu vaccine from legal liability in the event that a vaccine or antiviral is found to be defective or harmful.

DeLauro supports meaningful liability protection to encourage drugmakers to prepare for avian flu, but objected to this controversial provision, which was slipped into the Defense Appropriations bill last year by Senator Frist (R-TN), after the completion of the legislative agreement and after members had left the room.

"I believe that some sort of liability protection or indemnification is necessary and appropriate to encourage drugmakers to deal with pandemic flu and I would support reasonable language. But Senator Frist unilaterally rewrote liability law in this country," said DeLauro. "Not only was this done in the dead of night, absent careful consideration, with no public hearings or debate among members of this body, it granted sweeping, unchecked, power granted to a Cabinet Secretary. These kinds of maneuvers have become commonplace in the Congress - a Congress where special interests write the laws to the detriment of the public interest."

After the provision was added, it was discovered that liability protection was granted not only to vaccines being developed to prepare us for an avian flu outbreak but also a far broader range of potential vaccines, medical equipment - just about anything else that the HHS Secretary deems appropriate.

"I am also concerned that under this law, manufacturers and their suppliers, distributors and their employees would be shielded from a lawsuit even if they turned out to be negligent or reckless," said DeLauro. "How many of us would agree that a negligent distributor—someone who ruined a vaccine by mishandling it, for example—should be held harmless? Do we really want to say that a drugmaker who knows that its product is defective but chooses to sell it anyway is above the law?

"At a time when we are facing the frightening prospect that millions of Americans could contract this deadly flu, our first priority ought to be to inoculate the American public from a deadly strain of flu - not inoculate drug companies from the threat of legal liability."

http://www.house.gov/delauro/press/2006/March/liability_amendment_3_16_06.html