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Page Number: 28.0

6 

BRUESEWITZ v. WYETH LLC 

BREYER, J., concurring 

manufacturers’  product  liability  while  simultaneously 
augmenting  the  role  of  experts  in  making  compensation 
decisions. 

III 

The  United  States,  reflecting  the  views  of  HHS,  urges 
the Court to read the Act as I and the majority would do.
It  notes  that  the  compensation  program’s  listed  vaccines 
have  survived  rigorous  administrative  safety  review.    It 
says  that  to  read  the  Act  as  permitting  design-defect
lawsuits  could  lead  to  a  recurrence  of  “exactly  the  crisis 
that precipitated the Act,” namely withdrawals of vaccines 
or  vaccine  manufacturers  from  the  market,  “disserv[ing] 
the  Act’s  central  purposes,”  and  hampering  the  ability  of 
the  agency’s  “expert  regulators,  in  conjunction  with  the
medical community, [to] control the availability and with-
drawal  of  a  given  vaccine.”    Brief  for  United  States  as 
Amicus Curiae 30, 31. 

The United States is supported in this claim by leading 
public health organizations, including the American Acad-
emy  of  Pediatrics,  the  American  Academy  of  Family  Phy-
sicians, the American College of Preventive Medicine, the
American  Public  Health  Association,  the  American  Medi-
cal Association, the March of Dimes Foundation, the Pedi-
atric  Infectious  Diseases  Society,  and  15  other  similar 
organizations.  Brief  for  American  Academy  of  Pediatrics
et al. as Amici Curiae (hereinafter AAP Brief).  The Ameri-
can  Academy  of  Pediatrics  has  also  supported  the  reten-
tion  of  vaccine  manufacturer  tort  liability  (provided  that 
federal  law  structured  state-law  liability  conditions  in
ways  that  would  take  proper  account  of  federal  agency 
views  about  safety).  Hearings  14–15.    But  it  nonetheless 
tells us here, in respect to the specific question before us,
that  the  petitioners’  interpretation  of  the  Act  would  un-
dermine  its  basic  purposes  by  threatening  to  “halt  the
future  production  and  development  of  childhood  vaccines