In Reply.—The author did not wish to respond. I have a great deal of interest in this area, however, and thought that a response to Dr Lokietz' letter was important.
I do not agree with his assessment of the National Vaccine Compensation Program and its implementation. Having participated in the defense of physicians and others in vaccine-related litigation, I can attest to the harm that the tort-system handling of these claims has for everyone concerned. In my view, substitution of the compensation method for adjudicating claims of vaccine-induced injuries is a far better method than the adversarial legal method.
Initially, an agreement on what would be included in the Vaccine Injury Table,1 which is the source for determining the applicability of a given claim, was the only way that the system could work. That the table will need refinement in the future is clear. That not everyone accepts