Health
‘Shocking cover-up’: DOJ lawyers committed fraud in vaccine injury case, CHD attorney alleges in motion

From LifeSiteNews
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., The Defender
“The evidence submitted in support of the motion clearly shows that attorneys from the Department of Justice concealed and misrepresented highly relevant information from the special masters in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the judges in the courts”
Rolf Hazlehurst, a Children’s Health Defense (CHD) staff attorney and father of a son with autism, filed a motion in federal court on April 2 alleging lawyers representing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) fraudulently concealed evidence that vaccines can cause autism.
In a motion filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Hazlehurst alleged that U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers who represented HHS in vaccine injury cases repeatedly defrauded the judicial system – from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) to the U.S. Supreme Court.
That fraud led to thousands of families of vaccine-injured children being denied the right to compensation and the right to have their cases heard, according to the motion.
“This motion makes very serious and well-substantiated allegations of a massive scheme of fraud on the courts,” said Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel who also is of counsel to Hazlehurst in the federal case.
“The evidence submitted in support of the motion clearly shows that attorneys from the Department of Justice concealed and misrepresented highly relevant information from the special masters in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the judges in the courts,” Mack Rosenberg told The Defender.
Hazlehurst’s son Yates regressed into autism after being vaccinated as an infant. In the early 2000s, his family and thousands of others filed cases seeking compensation for vaccine-induced autism through the NVICP.
The program consolidated all of the petitions into the Omnibus Autism Proceeding (OAP) and selected six representative “test cases” – of which Yates’ was the second – as the basis for determining the outcome of the remaining 5,400 cases.
Unbeknownst at the time to the petitioners and the NVICP special masters, the DOJ’s star expert medical witness, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman informed DOJ attorneys during the ongoing omnibus proceedings that he had reversed his original opinion and determined that vaccines can and do cause autism in some cases.
In what Hazlehurst alleges was “a shocking cover-up,” instead of allowing Zimmerman to share his revised opinion, the DOJ attorneys relieved Zimmerman of his duties as a witness.
However, they continued to use excerpts from his unamended written opinion to make their case that vaccines did not cause autism – misrepresenting his position and committing “fraud on the court.”
According to the motion, the DOJ’s first act of fraud snowballed into a scheme of deception with far-reaching implications in which DOJ attorneys repeatedly misrepresented Zimmerman’s opinion and concealed other evidence that emerged during the test case hearings in the OAP in subsequent cases before multiple courts.
“As a result, thousands of cases in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding were denied compensation and the impact beyond the OAP is enormous,” Mack Rosenberg said. “This fraud affected the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program – especially the Omnibus Autism Proceeding – the Court of Federal Claims, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and even the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Hazlehurst said he is “asking the court to give this motion the serious attention it deserves.” He added, “At a minimum, the court should allow discovery and hold a hearing on this motion.”
Overturning a ruling due to fraud on the court is an extraordinary remedy reserved for extraordinary cases but according to Hazlehurst, “This motion we filed shows that this indeed is an extraordinary case.”
The DOJ has until April 30 to respond to the motion.
CHD CEO Mary Holland told The Defender, “Vaccines most definitely do cause autism, and the government has been lying about this reality for decades.”
Holland added:
With others, I published a law review article in 2011 showing that the government absolutely knew that vaccines cause autism – and yet they have covered it up and lied about it since the inception of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
How many hundreds of thousands of children and families would have been spared the heartaches and crushing financial burdens of autism had the government come clean?
‘Exceptionally difficult’ to obtain compensation through NVICP
In the late 1980s, a substantial number of lawsuits for vaccine injuries related to Wyeth’s (now Pfizer) DPT vaccine, combined with “grossly insufficient compensation” for victims of vaccine injury, threatened the vaccine program’s viability.
In response, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which established the “vaccine court.” The law gave the pharmaceutical industry broad protection from liability and proposed to compensate vaccine-injured children through the new NVICP.
The NVICP originally was designed to be a “swift, flexible, and less adversarial alternative to the often costly and lengthy civil arena of traditional tort litigation.”
To receive compensation, parents file a claim with the program.
The Court of Federal Claims (which oversees the program) appoints “special masters” – typically lawyers who previously represented the U.S. government – to manage and decide the individual claims. Attorneys may represent the petitioners, and the DOJ represents HHS.
NVICP proceedings are more informal than a typical courtroom. Unlike regular court proceedings, petitioners in the “vaccine court” have no right to discovery.
If a petitioner files a claim for a vaccine covered under the program and listed on the Vaccine Injury Table – the list of known vaccine side effects associated with certain vaccines within set time frames – it is presumed that a vaccine caused the petitioner’s injury and the petitioner is eligible for compensation without proof of causation.
However, if a petitioner experiences an “off-table injury” – an injury not listed on the table or that didn’t happen in the recognized injury time frame – the petitioner must prove by “a preponderance of evidence” that the vaccine caused the injury. Evidence includes medical records and expert witness testimony.
Claims must be filed within three years of the first symptom or two years of death.
Petitioners must provide a medical theory of the cause, a sequence of cause and effect, and show a temporal relationship between vaccine and injury.
However, the NVICP does not specify the required volume and type of evidence, so meeting the “preponderance of evidence” standard is largely at the discretion of the special master.
Petitioners can appeal NVICP cases to the Court of Federal Claims, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It is “exceptionally difficult” to obtain compensation within the NVICP, Hazlehurst told The Defender. The proceedings are often turned into drawn-out, contentious expert battles and the backlog of cases is substantial.
The Vaccine Act of 1986 is unjust for petitioners, Hazlehurst alleges. And that injustice reached its zenith with the OAP, when the DOJ perpetrated fraud right under the noses of the special masters, signaling the beginning of the fraud on the courts that continues to this day.
Hazlehurst told The Defender he hopes his motion will shed light on the damage inflicted by this law and that it will ultimately help end the autism epidemic.
“The Vaccine Act of 1986 is one of the fundamental causes of the autism epidemic,” Hazlehurst said. “Understanding why this is true, and how the United States Department of Justice perpetrated fraud upon the courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the key to ending the autism epidemic.”
A short history of the autism omnibus proceedings
By 2002, to address a “massive influx” of petitions alleging vaccine-induced autism, the Office of Special Masters combined over 5,000 claims into the OAP to determine whether vaccines cause autism and if so, under what conditions.
Initially, the NVICP planned to investigate causation issues and apply those general findings to individual cases. However, the program changed its strategy and instead selected six “test cases” by which it would examine the evidence for injuries caused by the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine, thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCV), or a combination of both.
Then it would apply the findings of the test cases to other similar cases.
In doing so, Hazlehurst alleges, the court conflated general causation evidence with specific causation evidence from a few cases, without allowing for rules of discovery or evidence that would apply in an actual court.
This, Hazlehurst said, “was a recipe for disaster” as each test case was then used to determine the outcome for the remaining 5,000 cases.
Three cases – Cedillo v. HHS, Hazlehurst v. HHS, and Poling v. HHS – are at the center of the alleged fraud by the DOJ.
Fraud #1: the Zimmerman testimony
Hearings for the first OAP test case, Cedillo v. HHS, began in 2007. Zimmerman had worked with the DOJ to prepare an expert report on behalf of HHS finding that Michelle Cedillo’s autism had likely not been caused by the MMR vaccine.
Zimmerman later wrote in a 2018 affidavit that he attended the Cedillo hearing and listened to the testimony of Dr. Marcel Kinsbourne, another world-renowned expert in pediatric neurology.
On that basis, Zimmerman stated, he decided to clarify his written expert opinion about Michelle Cedillo, concerned it would be taken out of context.
Zimmerman spoke with DOJ attorneys to clarify that his expert opinion in the Cedillo case “was not intended to be a blanket statement as to all children and all medical science,” according to the 2018 affidavit.
He specified that advances in science, medicine and his own clinical research had led him to believe there were exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism.
He also referred the attorneys to a paper he published with colleagues in 2006, the Poling paper, describing the case of an unidentified child who suffered regressive autism following vaccine adverse reactions. The paper suggested a possible association between mitochondrial dysfunction, vaccinations and regressive autism.
After communicating this evidence to DOJ attorneys, the DOJ dismissed Zimmerman as a witness but continued to use his written opinion as general causation evidence.
The DOJ was also allowed to use that report, submitted in one test case, as general causation evidence in other test cases.
None of the petitioners in the test cases could cross-examine Zimmerman, because he was no longer a witness. This was only possible because the federal rules of evidence do not apply in NVICP proceedings.
Yates’ case, Hazlehurst v. HHS, was the second test case in the OAP. His treating neurologist, Dr. Jean-Ronel Corbier testified Yates’ autism was likely caused by a genetic predisposition combined with an environmental insult in the form of vaccinations administered when Yates was ill. (Yates was a patient of Zimmerman in 2002.)
Corbier’s theory of causation in Yates was similar to the theory developed by Zimmerman in the Poling paper and shared with DOJ attorneys.
Yet, despite knowing Zimmerman had concluded that in a subset of children like Yates, vaccines can cause autism, the DOJ “intentionally and fraudulently” misrepresented Zimmerman’s expert testimony in its closing statements in Yates’ case, Hazlehurst alleges.
DOJ attorneys selectively quoted Zimmerman’s expert report from the Cedillo case, telling the court that Zimmerman found there was “no sound evidence to support a causative relationship with exposure to both or either MMR and/or mercury,” when Zimmerman had explicitly told the DOJ that his opinion was the opposite, according to the affidavit.
Fraud #2: the Hannah Poling case
Three weeks after closing arguments in Yates’ case, the DOJ quietly conceded Hannah Poling’s case, which was on the verge of becoming the fourth test case.
Hannah regressed into autism over several months after being vaccinated against nine diseases at one doctor’s visit.
In 2003, Poling’s father, Jon, a physician and trained neurologist, and mother, Terry, an attorney and nurse, filed an autism petition against HHS under the NVICP for their daughter’s injuries.
Jon Poling was a co-author of the 2006 paper with Zimmerman that analyzed an unnamed child, later revealed as Hannah Poling, who had a mitochondrial disorder – a condition with which Yates was later diagnosed.
In 2007, just three weeks after the lead DOJ attorney misrepresented Zimmerman’s opinion during the hearing in Hazlehurst, the same DOJ attorney submitted a report to the special masters conceding that in the case of Poling v. HHS, Hannah’s “regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder” (i.e., regressive autism) was caused by a vaccine injury, based upon a preponderance of the evidence standard.
This was the same neurological diagnosis Zimmerman had made for Yates in 2002.
According to court documents, if HHS had not conceded Poling, Poling v. HHS would have been designated as a test case. However, because the DOJ conceded the case, it was taken out of the omnibus and the DOJ had the case records sealed – although they were later leaked to the press and published in the Huffington Post in 2008.
In March 2008, Hannah’s parents moved to make the proceedings transparent and available to the public, but the DOJ opposed the motion and the NVICP deferred a ruling on the motion for 60 days.
During those 60 days, the DOJ filed amendments to its report conceding the Poling case. It retroactively changed the basis for compensation to say that Hannah had a “table injury.”
This meant that instead of conceding that the petitioners had proven with a preponderance of evidence that the vaccines caused her autism, they said she had a presumptive injury on the vaccine table, in which causation is presumed.
By conceding the Poling case, opposing the parents’ motion for complete transparency and changing the basis for compensation, the DOJ was able to conceal fraud and critical material evidence of how vaccines cause autism, according to Hazlehurst.
Fraud #3: appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court
On Feb. 12, 2009, the special masters denied compensation in the first three cases. They found the petitioners failed to establish causation between MMR or TCV vaccines and autism.
In Hazlehurst’s case, the NVICP explicitly relied on the portion of Zimmerman’s expert report that DOJ attorneys misrepresented.
The Hazlehursts appealed to the Court of Federal Claims and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, both of which upheld the special master’s decision – by relying on Zimmerman’s misrepresented opinion and knowingly fraudulent statements made by a DOJ attorney, according to Hazlehurst.
Those prior decisions directly influenced the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Bruesewitz v. Wyeth.
In that case, Wyeth, now Pfizer, argued that a decision favoring the Bruesewitz family – who was attempting to sue the company for their daughter’s vaccine injury – would lead to a “flood of frivolous lawsuits,” including by the families from the omnibus.
Amicus briefs from the American Academy of Pediatrics, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Sanofi Pasteur on behalf of Wyeth relied on Hazlehurst v. HHS and other OAP decisions that were based on the misrepresentation of Zimmerman’s testimony that there was “no scientific basis” that vaccines cause autism.
The Supreme Court ruled that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and the NVICP it created, preempt all design-defect claims against vaccine manufacturers by individuals seeking compensation for injury or death.
In oral arguments and in their written opinions, the justices explicitly cited the portions of the amicus briefs citing Hazlehurst v. HHS and other OAP rulings that relied on the DOJ misrepresentations in their rulings.
Since that ruling, the special masters have continued to rely on the DOJ’s fraudulent claims to deny compensation to families filing complaints in the NVICP.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD chairman on leave, and Hazlehurst in September 2018 filed a complaint with the DOJ Office of Inspector General outlining what they then knew about the DOJ’s fraud during the OAP.
The DOJ Office of Professional Misconduct investigated and responded in a June 2019 letter that it found no wrongdoing.
In that letter, however, the Office of Professional Responsibility conceded the DOJ had in fact kept Zimmerman’s testimony while dismissing him as a witness in order to avoid creating the appearance that he had changed his opinion and to prevent the petitioners from cross-examining him, according to Hazlehurst.
The ‘fraud on the court’ doctrine
It has taken 17 years, Hazlehurst said, since the DOJ’s first alleged act of fraud upon the court, for him to gather all of the admissible evidence necessary to “connect the dots and reveal the DOJ’s web of deceit” to make this claim under the “fraud on the court” doctrine.
Under this doctrine, codified as Rule 60(d)(3) in the rules of the Court of Federal Claims, there is no time limit for the court to overturn a judgment made on the basis of fraud on the court.
The petitioner must demonstrate that there was fraud, intent to defraud and that the fraud affected more than one instance of litigation – putting the integrity of the judicial process at stake.
Hazlehurst alleges DOJ attorneys committed fraud by knowingly making false statements and offering evidence they knew to be false and that they did not take remedial action to disclose information they knew to be false and misleading to the court.
The special masters themselves have an obligation to consider all relevant evidence, but didn’t, in this case, Hazlehurst said. Instead, they ignored the contradictions in Zimmerman’s opinions and ignored the Poling evidence.
This is particularly problematic for NVICP cases, where petitioners can’t conduct meaningful discovery or cross-examination and the special masters’ oversight is the only meaningful safeguard to prevent the DOJ’s abuse of power, according to Hazlehurst.
“There is nothing fair about a government proceeding where the government controls the admissibility of evidence,” he said.
Hazlehurst said that by forcing people injured by vaccines into an administrative program, petitioners are deprived of the basic constitutional rights to due process and equal protection under the law. “It should be declared unconstitutional,” he said.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Health
Selective reporting on measles outbreaks is a globalist smear campaign against Trump administration.

From LifeSiteNews
Ontario has a larger outbreak than Texas. European cases dwarf the Texas outbreak. But the World Health Organization has launched a travel advisory for the United States.
In the currently ongoing outbreak, there have been about 572 measles cases in Ontario, Canada. This is a significantly larger outbreak than the currently hyped one in Texas, which has about 422 cases. The mainstream media has almost completely ignored the Ontario outbreak – their reporting has only focused on the Texas outbreak.
Ontario’s top public health official, Dr. Kieran Moore, does not recommend mandatory vaccination and says the standard public health measures to limit the spread are working. This is a very reasonable response, yet when Sec. Kennedy says something similar; he is viciously attacked.
It is evident by the mainstream media response to the Ontario outbreak versus the Texas outbreak that this is yet another example of the liberal media/pharma machine harassing Kennedy and President Trump.
However, this reporting has an even more sinister aspect – as the media appears to have taken their lead from the World Health Organization.
The World Health Organization has launched a travel advisory for the United States. See the screenshots below (the first screenshot is from an AI summarizer at BRAVE and the second one is from the WHO website):
But what about Canada’s outbreak? Why isn’t Canada mentioned in the travel advisory? Was it an oversight? Did the WHO release a travel advisory just for Canada?
The answer is that the WHO has not put out a travel advisory for Canada, or Ontario, Canada.
In fact, the AI summarizer at BRAVE is clear that the WHO doesn’t put out travel advisories for individual countries, like Canada… The new normal is that the WHO puts out special advisories only for the United States <insert sarcasm>.
And in fact, a search on the WHO website yields not a single mention of the measles outbreak in Canada.
In fact, the WHO places the 422 measles cases in the United States on par with the earthquake in Myanmar, which may have killed up to 10,000 people, all told.
But somehow the 572 cases of measles in Canada don’t deserve a mention.
But wait – the story gets even more bizarre.
The European Region, which includes central Asia, continues to have a significantly high number of measles cases.
The WHO European Region has a population of approximately 745 million people, and had about 127,350 measles cases last year, or 1 in 5,850 people.
Yet – crickets from mainstream media on this factoid.
Why the outcry over 422 measles in Texas?
Here are some ideas:
- To reduce support for RFK Jr., Trump, and MAHA by the American people.
- To scare parents into vaccinating.
- To increase the money going to public health for vaccine stockpiling.
- To support the liberal left in their obsessive hatred of anything MAHA.
- Because the WHO put out a travel advisory.
In the meantime, the WHO has announced that, despite budgetary cuts, they have a $2.5 billion gap for 2025-2027. WHO Director General Tedros correctly blamed Trump for the deficit. However, what Tedros gets wrong is that this deficit is a well-deserved consequence of years of corruption at the WHO leading to this outcome.
This is how it is done, folks.
This is called retaliation by the World Health Organization against the Trump administration.
Another wrap-up smear in action. The deep state and the globalists are pulling out all the stops to attack Trump and Kennedy via “trumped-up” WHO travel advisories and emergency reports that are then reported on breathlessly and uncritically by mainstream media. The propaganda machine continues unabated.
Reprinted with permission from Robert Malone.
COVID-19
Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

From LifeSiteNews
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.
Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.
The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.
A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.
MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.
However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.
For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.
Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.
“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.
“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.
Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.
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