Court Opinion

ID: 9467647
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:53:14.314382+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:26.890309
License: Public Domain

TANG, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. Quite simply, the record fails to support the majority’s assertion that “appellant was aware in April 1963, that the Sabin vaccine was the likely cause of Davis’ injury.” First, although Davis contacted polio in April 1963, he was hospitalized until October 25, 1963, and it is unclear when he had sufficiently recovered to be aware of anything. At best, the record indicates that Davis was functioning again in “approximately June, 1963” when he began to write letters inquiring about his disease. Clerk’s Transcript Vol. IA, at 243.
More importantly, although Davis may have wondered in the summer of 1962 if the vaccine had induced his disease, “questioning” and a “knowing” causation cannot be equated. The Kubrick court plainly held that the statute begins to run only when a plaintiff is “armed with the facts about the harm done to him ...” 444 U.S. at 123, 100 S.Ct. at 360. In other words, the plaintiff must be in “possession of the critical facts that he has been hurt and who has inflicted the injury” because “the facts about causation may be in the control of the putative defendant, unavailable to the plaintiff or at least very difficult to obtain.” Id. at 122, 100 S.Ct. at 359 (emphasis added). In Kubrick, the plaintiff had surgery in April and developed a hearing loss in mid-June. In succeeding months, he consulted several specialists who diagnosed his malady as “bilateral nerve disease”. Finally, in January (some 7 months after injury), a doctor told Kubrick that it was “highly possible” that a treatment administered after surgery caused his deafness. At that point, the court held, Kubrick knew of his injury and its cause and the statute began to run.
Here, Davis may have suspected that the vaccine caused his disease (just as Kubrick may have suspected his recent surgery was in some way connected), but apparently no one, much less a doctor, would even suggest a “high possibility” that the two events were causally linked. To the contrary, all authorities consulted apparently assured Davis that oral Sabin vaccine could not be proved to cause the disease. For example, sometime in October, 1963, still searching for the cause of his disease, Davis wrote to the Washington State Department of Health. In recounting his story, he stated:
During the last six months I have had around 20 Drs. check me and everyone of them have said I was paralyzed, which I was just a little bit aware of. Not one of them would say a damn thing or admit it could have been due to the cube that was the cause of my illness . . . [sic]
Clerk’s Transcript, Vol. IA, at 286.
Consistent with this description, on October 25,1963, Davis was discharged with a diagnosis of paralytic poliomyelitis “due to undetermined cause”. Id. at 241. Interestingly, in fact, the Idaho State epidemiologist refused to report Davis’ case as poliomyelitis, and, in the Fall of 1964 was still diagnosing Davis’ disease as “lower neuron disease with paralysis — etiology unknown”. Id. at 245.
Moreover, the scientists to whom Davis wrote, and the articles he read, failed to *333suggest a causal connection between the vaccine and the paralysis. For example, an HEW doctor stated in an article published in June 1963 that “no evidence has been adduced to show that this vaccine, composed of these strains, had ever caused the disease it was designed to prevent.” Id. at 244. Similarly, in the summer of 1964, Dr. Sabin informed Davis “that there was absolutely no way” that he could have contracted polio from taking the vaccine. Id. at 246. See also id. (U.S. government committee report of September 30,1964, stating that “it is not possible to prove that any individual case was caused by the vaccine and that no laboratory tests available can provide a definitive answer”).
The record available to me, then, suggests that Davis was still struggling to determine the cause of his injury by the critical date in October 1963, and well beyond. In any event, at the least the question when Davis knew (1) of his injury (paralysis) and (2) its cause (the vaccine) should be a factual determination for the jury, and I would reverse the premature grant of summary judgment. Such a result is justified since the Government, as the moving party, has failed to carry its burden of demonstrating the absence of a genuine issue of material fact. See also Marshall v. Kimberly-Clark Corp., 625 F.2d 1300, 1302 (5th Cir. 1980) (“A dispute over the facts surrounding the date the statute of limitations began ‘would alone warrant denial of the motion for summary judgment.’ ”); see generally Yazzie v. Olney, Levy, Kaplan & Tenner, 593 F.2d 100, 103 (9th Cir. 1979).
In sum, I agree that the majority properly states the Kubrick rule. On this record, however, I fail to see how it can affirm the summary judgment.