Georgia Injury Lawyers Blog

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that families cannot sue vaccine manufacturers over injuries caused by what they claim are defective and dangerous childhood vaccines. This ruling conflicts with a 2008 decision by the Georgia Supreme Court on this issue..
This decision is a setback to parents who have claimed that their children have suffered injuries such as autism due to these vaccines. The recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court relegates at least a design-defect type of claim to the federal vaccine court, a special compensation system set up by a 1986 federal statute that is supposed to be a no-fault system,but in reality caps recovery amounts. This in our view is extremely unfair to plaintiffs.
The federal vaccine statute provides that vaccine manufacturers cannot be liable for injury or death caused by vaccines in many types of civil lawsuits, "if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings." In a ruling in a case in which Atlanta parents claimed their son suffered neurological injuries as a result of the preservative, thimerosal in his immunizations, our Georgia Supreme Court held that design-defect claims over vaccine injuries were not precluded by Federal law. . Now, however, this United States Supreme Court decision raises serious roadblocks for parents in Georgia & throughout the country.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that all routine vaccines that are recommended for children under the age of six, other than some flu vaccines, no longer contain any more than trace amounts of the preservative thimerosal. The CDC maintains that the evidence does not show a causal relationship between vaccines containing this preservative and autism.Other scientific studies do not agree with this conclusion.
Our lawfirm, pursuing defective product claims (also called product liability cases) is constantly monitoring developments in the law wherever it may effect Georgia citizens.