On August 14, 2025, under the leadership of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and Director Jay Bhattacharya, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that the HHS has revived it’s “Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines”, a legal obligation born out of the 1986 Act.
“When Congress eliminated pharmaceutical companies’ liability for vaccines in 1986, it made HHS responsible for vaccine safety. To assure HHS is actually performing this critical duty of assuring the safety of products injected into babies, the same 1986 law created a task force on safer childhood vaccines. This task force was supposed to make recommendations to the Secretary of HHS on how to make vaccines safer and the Secretary, in turn, was required to file a report with Congress every two years detailing efforts to improve vaccine safety.” [1]
HHS disbanded the taskforce in 1998 and to this day it never once filed a single legally required report to congress on vaccine safety, as revealed through two freedom of information Act (FOIA) requests by ICAN. [2]
“HHS will transmit its first formal report to Congress within two years, with updates every two years thereafter” the announcement stated.