Richard H. Hughes, IV, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in The Bulwark, in “RFK Jr. Could Blow Up the Vaccine Industry with One Simple Move,” by Jonathan Cohn.
Following is an excerpt:
… But it’s also easy to imagine major manufacturers giving up on vaccines—or, at least, giving that line of business a lot less attention. That’s especially true when Kennedy is simultaneously taking so many other steps to limit vaccine availability and development, whether it’s purging advisory boards of well-respected mainstream scientists to make room for fringe critics of vaccination or canceling Biden-era grants to fund the development of next-generation mRNA vaccines.
“My concern is that if they’re trying to . . . essentially dissolve the liability protections for manufacturers, I worry that this would open the floodgates to lawsuits,” Richard Hughes, a Washington-based attorney with a long career of advising vaccine manufacturers and serving on government boards, told me.
“At that point,” added Hughes, who during the COVID pandemic worked for the mRNA vaccine manufacturer Moderna, “why would this be an attractive market to stay in, with that kind of liability threat?”