Roy Greene v. HHS - Td, brachial neuritis (2020)

Roy Greene filed a petition on September 29, 2011, alleging that a tetanus-diphtheria (Td) vaccination he received on July 22, 2009 caused him to develop brachial neuritis (also known as Parsonage-Turner Syndrome or neuralgic amyotrophy). Petitioner had received the Td vaccine in his right arm following a construction-related hand injury at his workplace.

After a fact hearing in March 2015, Special Master Corcoran found that petitioner's symptoms began no earlier than September 1, 2009—forty-one days after the vaccination—and dismissed petitioner's Table claim because the onset fell outside the twenty-eight-day brachial neuritis Table window. Petitioner's remaining non-Table causation claim required him to establish that a forty-one-day onset was medically acceptable for Td-induced brachial neuritis.

Petitioner submitted expert reports from Dr. Thomas W.

Wright (orthopedist) and Dr. Marcel Kinsbourne (neurologist).

The special master issued an initial Decision Denying Entitlement on May 26, 2017, finding that petitioner's experts had relied on conclusory ipse dixit reasoning and improperly attempted to leverage the Vaccine Injury Table's twenty-eight-day timeframe for the non-Table claim. The special master subsequently granted reconsideration, and in a September 26, 2017 Decision on Reconsideration again denied entitlement.

The United States Court of Federal Claims (Judge Sweeney) vacated the reconsideration decision on February 27, 2018, finding that the special master had applied the interest-of-justice standard rather than the merits standard and had improperly discounted petitioner's evidence based on its dilatory submission. On remand, the parties participated in an entitlement hearing on May 9, 2019, at which both sides presented expert testimony.

Special Master Corcoran again denied entitlement on August 2, 2019, concluding that petitioner had not met his burden of establishing by a preponderance that a forty-one-day timeframe for onset of brachial neuritis after receipt of the Td vaccine was medically reasonable. The special master found petitioner's expert evidence insufficiently specific to brachial neuritis or the Td vaccine, that respondent's expert credibly opined that four weeks was the outer limit for medically acceptable latency, and that petitioner's contemporaneous workplace hand trauma constituted an unrebutted alternative cause.

The Court of Federal Claims (Chief Judge Sweeney) denied petitioner's motion for review on January 28, 2020 and sustained the special master's decision.