Effort to classify COVID vax injuries gains momentum

Driving the news: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials last week considered a proposal from a nonprofit representing individuals with COVID-19 vaccine injuries that would add a distinct code to the system doctors use to classify illnesses.

• The ICD-10 system already covers general vaccine injuries and reactions to some specific vaccines, but it doesn't have a designation for the COVID shot, whose safety has become a major point of contention within the administration.
• The new code could allow providers "to identify, track, and study patients who experience adverse effects specifically related to COVID vaccines," Mary Stanfill, a CDC health information specialist, said during a public meeting on code proposals last week.
• Codes are also used for insurance payouts, as well as research and statistical analysis.

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon told Axios that next steps for the code will depend on public comments that are due by mid-May. The new code would take effect in the fall of 2027, if the plan is finalized.

State of play: Joel Wallskog, co-chairman of React19, the nonprofit that organized the petition, said a code is the first step toward improving care for people who've had serious side effects from the COVID-19 shot.

• "It's hard to treat what you can't define," said Wallskog, a doctor who says he developed health issues himself following vaccination.
• A specific code would make it easier to spot COVID-19 vaccine injuries in medical records, and could lead to better research, he said.
• Wallskog proposed a code during the pandemic in 2022, but said he didn't receive a response from the Biden administration.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s handpicked vaccine advisers were due to discuss COVID-19 vaccine injuries at a meeting this month, but it was postponed after a federal judge stayed the advisers' appointments and previous votes.

• Some committee members planned to recommend creating a code for "post-acute COVID-19 vaccination syndrome," the New York Times reported. Wallskog said his group was scheduled to present at the meeting.

Yes, but: Some public health experts say the adverse effects of COVID vaccines need to be better understood before a code is created.

• Medical authorities haven't formally recognized post-vaccination syndrome — whose symptoms include fatigue, brain fog and insomnia — and have urged more research about its underpinnings.
• There also have been shifting estimates of the prevalence of heart inflammation and abnormalities months after getting the mRNA shots.

Jake Scott, a clinical associate professor of infectious diseases at Stanford, wrote in an op-ed last week that a leaked committee report estimated that COVID-19 vaccine injuries affect anywhere between 1 in 33,000 people to 1 in 111 young and middle-aged persons.

• "A clinical entity whose prevalence cannot be estimated within three orders of magnitude is not ready for ICD-10 codification. It is ready for more research," Scott wrote.

Between the lines: As the vaccine injury code debate plays out, anti-vaccine advocates are pushing the Trump administration to add more than 300 conditions to a federal vaccine injury compensation program.

• Wallskog told Axios he's not viewing the creation of a code as a precursor to legal action or compensation.
• But formalizing a diagnosis without an established link between symptoms and the vaccine could be part of a broader strategy to set the stage for litigation against manufacturers, said Richard Hughes, a lawyer at law firm Epstein Becker & Green, who's leading a legal challenge against Kennedy's vaccine advisory committee.