A 16-year-old boy with autism and his family are suing a medical clinic for administering vaccines they believe caused the boy's autism. The Tennessee-based case is unique for a number of reasons, the first being that it's the first time in 30 years that a vaccine case such as this has been heard in a U.S. court.

This is because in the U.S. there is a federally operated vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) that Congress created under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims in the District of Columbia (Washington D.C.) handles contested vaccine injury and death cases in what has become known as "vaccine court."

The VICP is a "no-fault" alternative to the traditional civil court lawsuit and was established in 1986 after a string of high-profile lawsuits slammed vaccine manufacturers.

The federal VICP compensates vaccine victims not from a fund paid into by vaccine manufacturers, but through a federal trust fund that collects a 75-cent surcharge on every vaccine given.

The 16-year-old Tennessee boy, Yates Hazlehurst, was denied compensation from the VICP, so the current lawsuit is giving him a second chance at justice.

CDC Blocks Key Whistleblower Testimony From Autism-Vaccine Case

A key part of the case hinges on testimony from Dr. William Thompson, a research scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases (NCIR).

He was a co-author of four key studies the CDC has used to refute a link between the MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) vaccine and autism, as well as thimerosal-containing vaccines (thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative) and autism.

Thompson claimed the CDC covered up a vaccine-autism connection in relation to the MMR vaccine. According to a news release provided by the World Mercury Project;¹

"Dr. Thompson has publically stated to Congressman William Posey and others that he and his colleagues in the CDC Vaccine Safety Branch were ordered to commit scientific fraud, destroy evidence and manipulate data to conceal the link between autism and vaccines."

According to Thompson, one of the studies in question found that African-American boys who received the MMR vaccine before the age of 36 months had an increased risk for autism.² He also maintains that CDC studies have found a relationship between thimerosal and tics, which are associated with autism.³

CDC: Thompson's Testimony Would Not Promote CDC Objectives

Thompson's testimony could be critical to the lawsuit in order to set the record straight about the flawed data used to deny other autism vaccine-injury claims.

According to Ecowatch, Morgan & Morgan law firm attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. argued to Tennessee Senior Circuit Court Judge William Acree that Thompson's testimony was necessary:⁴

"Yates, and almost 5,000 other vaccine injured autistic children, lost their cases in vaccine court because CDC and the Justice Department submitted fraudulent science wrongly denying the vaccine-autism link."

CDC director Thomas Frieden blocked the request to have Thompson testify, stating, "Dr. William Thompson's deposition testimony would not substantially promote the objectives of CDC or HHS [Health and Human Services]."⁵

Thompson received federal whistleblower protection in August 2014 and is still employed by the CDC. The attorneys for the case, Kennedy and Bryan Smith, also with Morgan & Morgan, plan to appeal the CDC's denial. According to Smith:⁶

"Frieden's denial was a disappointment but not a surprise, since the inescapable implication of Dr. Thompson's allegation is that the agency altered the science to undermine autism cases worth potentially $1 trillion in compensation ordered by Congress."