$15 Million Verdict Against Wyeth Over DTP Vaccine Brain Damage

In March 1980, Charles and Tammy Graham brought their infant daughter Michelle to receive a routine vaccination. Within a short time of receiving Wyeth Laboratories' diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine, Michelle developed encephalopathy, a severe and irreversible neurological condition that left her unable to lead a normal life and dependent on continuous care.

The Grahams retained Andrew W. Hutton of the Wichita firm Michaud and Hutton to pursue a claim against Wyeth, the vaccine manufacturer. The case turned on the composition of Wyeth's whole-cell pertussis vaccine. The whole-cell preparation retained the entire Bordetella pertussis organism, including endotoxin and pertussis toxin, compounds suspected of causing adverse neurological reactions. Plaintiffs argued that the vaccine as manufactured was defective and that Wyeth had failed to adequately warn physicians of the known risks of encephalopathy.

After extensive litigation in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas, a jury returned a verdict of $15,000,000 in compensatory damages for Michelle Graham in 1987. The award was among the largest vaccine-injury verdicts in the country at that time and drew national attention to the DTP liability wave that had swept through American courts during the 1980s.

Wyeth appealed. The Tenth Circuit reversed the judgment in 1990 and ordered a new trial, finding that the district court had improperly excluded testimony from Wyeth's expert, a pediatric ophthalmologist who was prepared to testify that Michelle had suffered a stroke before her vaccination, and that an expert's calculations regarding vaccine endotoxin levels contained mathematical errors that undermined the reliability of plaintiff's causation proof. The verdict itself was not reduced or affirmed; the jury's $15 million award was set aside pending retrial.

The case settled during the second trial. The Graham litigation, together with other DTP suits filed in the same period, formed part of the pressure that led Wyeth and other manufacturers to invest in developing acellular pertussis vaccines with reduced toxin content. Congress responded to the broader DTP litigation crisis by passing the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which created the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and changed how future vaccine claims would be handled.