HHS Secretary Kennedy said the new Bethesda, Maryland clinic will listen to, study, and care for Americans injured by vaccines.
By Louis Conte of The MAHA Report on October 10, 2026
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the opening of a new clinic on Thursday – a clinic dedicated to studying and caring for patients who have been seriously injured by vaccines.
The clinic is located at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. It officially opened its doors to patients on Monday.
In conjunction with the announcement, Kennedy also unveiled a series of bold initiatives that aim to better understand and address the increase in Americans reporting vaccine injuries.
According to an HHS press release, the agency will:
- Modernize VAERS to make reporting simpler and improve the tools available to researchers and medical professionals investigating potential vaccine safety signals.
- Propose reimbursement to physicians for reporting suspected vaccine-related injuries to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) through a new Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) policy, bringing vaccine reporting in Medicare in line with typical Medicare reimbursement policies.
- Require that electronic health records capture vaccine-related adverse events so that information can follow patients across the healthcare system.
New Vaccine Injury Clinic in Bethesda
Kennedy led the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new vaccine-injury clinic at NIH headquarters in Bethesda on Monday. He was joined by the heads of the major agencies within HHS: Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health; Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Dr. Erica Schwartz, the new director of the CDC; and Kyle Diamantas, acting commissioner of the FDA.
“Today is a historic day,” said Bhattacharya. “We are opening a new vaccine injury clinic dedicated to developing the science of preventing vaccine injuries, making vaccines safer and, most important of all, listening to the voices of people who have suffered vaccine injuries so that we can learn from them and learn from their experience to make vaccines safer.”
At the event, Kennedy emphasized the importance of listening to the vaccine-injured and their families. “Vaccine injury is an invisible disease, and it is purposefully invisible,” he said. “For many years, moms and children with vaccine injuries, the parents of those children, people who suffered injuries themselves, have been marginalized, vilified, demonized and gaslighted, and they have not received the medical attention they need and we have not done the studies that need to be done to understand who’s vulnerable to those kinds of injuries.”
At a roundtable discussion with the vaccine-injured at NIH on Monday, Secretary Kennedy spoke to the incredible change in course the administration is taking.
“The Trump administration wants all the mothers, all the people who believe that they’ve been injured by vaccines to understand that you’re finally being listened to,” he said.
Pro-Vaccine Old Guard Balks
Legacy media viewed the changes differently. An article on CNN’s website quotes Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a bias,” said Offit. “His bias is that vaccines cause chronic diseases, and it doesn’t matter how many studies show he’s wrong.”
CNN did not cite the studies that Offit claims exist and did not report that Offit has made millions of dollars on vaccines. Offit has been called out in the past by journalist Sharyl Attkisson for conflicts of interest.
CNN also quoted the pro-vaccine figure, Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. “The US already has the most advanced sophisticated system of vaccine monitoring the world has ever seen, with multiple redundant systems in place,” Hotez said.
Hotez was not asked about a recent British Medical Journal investigation which found that “VAERS isn’t operating as intended and that signals are being missed.”
The BMJ investigation uncovered that VAERS received a crushing number of reported adverse events during the Covid vaccine rollout – despite the Biden administration’s insistence that all vaccines are “safe and effective.”
For his part, MAHA Action president Tony Lyons praised the administration’s initiative on behalf of the vaccine-injured.
“President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s new programs on providing healthcare to people with vaccine injuries is a historic and bold initiative that demonstrates a willingness to do what no one in public health leadership has done before – listening to those who have been harmed,” Lyons said.
He added, “The old days of neglecting, denying, and refusing to compensate for vaccine injuries are over.”
