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Comment by Fomite | Hacker News Reader

What you're looking for is the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, not the PATRIOT Act for limiting tort liability for vaccine manufacturers. Which is pretty much a precondition for doing business developing vaccines to address emergency vaccines.

Presumably you are a start-up minded person. Would you do business if someone said "We need you to implement some very complex code, rush it into production on our timetable, and if there's a hiccup, your users will sue you into oblivion."

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Curious how OP got this idea.

USA PATRIOT Act Sec. 1013 (a)(10), (b)(5,6) mentions research, distribution and stockpiling of vaccines but nothing about liability.

There was a decision in 2011 that might be of interest: http://blogs.findlaw.com/decided/2011/02/cant-sue-drug-compa... http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/02/22/us.scotus.vaccines/index...

It's called "Believing the first thing you hear or read on the Internet, and automatically rejecting everything you hear or read on the subject after that." It just means that some loony anti-vaxxer got to him/her first.

There ought to be a formal name for the fallacy of assigning greater credibility to earlier information, but I'm not sure what it would be.

It's essentially confirmation bias.

No, its called I got the name of the Act wrong.

Do you deny the primary point? That its illegal for you to sue vaccine makers?

No, and I understand why it's necessary to make it difficult to sue vaccine makers. Vaccines are not 100% safe or effective. Nobody ever said they were. The battle against disease cannot be fought with weapons that are 100% safe or effective, because such weapons don't exist. Unfortunately it's true that a very small number of vaccine recipients are going to experience some very severe side effects. Life goes on for the rest of us.

Meanwhile, as long as we rely on private industry to supply the vaccines we need, we have to protect the manufacturers from obviously-frivolous lawsuits that nevertheless require decades of research and millions of dollars in pointless, unproductive studies to prove that they're frivolous. For some reason this field attracts kooks... or haven't you noticed?

Makes sense. Thanks for responding.

You also got the year wrong by a decade and a half, which would seem to render nonsensical the part of your post where you talk about "since 2001."

Yes, the difference what year it was passed completely invalidates the point.

Moreover, this is not about "can't sue in case of national emergency". You can't sue period.

Other countries don't do this, why the US? Those poor uncivilized europeans with no vaccines.

Do you also drive cars where you can't sue Ford if it explodes?

The difference in what year and what act does cast doubt on the authority of your information. And it does limit your tort liability because, after a number of suits prior to the act, built on flimsy evidence, the vaccine manufacturing business in the U.S. became unpalatable.

Beyond that, other countries can and sometimes do do this. There's been discussions of limiting liability for Ebola vaccine manufacturers in the UK, because of the rush to market for them.

>after a number of suits prior to the act, built on flimsy evidence, the vaccine manufacturing business in the U.S. became unpalatable

Thats a funny way to say "big pharma bribed politicians".

Its amazing that the US was able to develop any technology, I mean imagine what state we would be in if you could sue car and plane manufacturers. Or if we could sue doctors?

You keep using Ford, when we do effectively limit the downside of domestic auto production via bailouts, or doctors, where tort liability is a major issue of discussion.

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