At age 81, I speak and write voluminously as a health care educator specializing in public health policy and practice for the treatment of pain and addiction. My wife and I are also careful about getting our periodic vaccinations for flu and COVID-19. A few days ago we responded to an invitation from our pharmacy to drop in for our shots on a walk-in basis. The process turned out to be a major aggravation. We showed up prepared to wait in line, of course. Pharmacies are busy places. But we were unprepared for the obstacle course that our pharmacy was forced to put into place for what should have been a simple process.

First, we had to go online to “make an appointment,” even though we were physically present and the pharmacist was available. Second, when we connected online to our pharmacy vaccination center, we were confronted with a battery of over twelve forms and questions that only a lawyer could have invented. I am willing to bet long odds that 99 percent of all applicants who go through this process do not have the foggiest idea what they are signing or why they are being forced to do so. One can understand why someone would want to confirm that the applicant has not had an allergic reaction to the vaccine they are requesting, or that the applicant has not already had a vaccination in the last 90 days. But why on earth should we be forced to verify that we have read (which almost nobody does) two four-page documents that describe bad vaccination outcomes that only a few patients ever experience, among hundreds of millions who have had the shots?

I actually tried to read one of these documents in real time on my iPhone. I threw up my hands after 10 minutes of wading through gobbledygook that I could not translate, even with my PhD in systems engineering plus 28 years of reading and research in complex medical literature. Seeing that I was nearing the limits of my patience and considering giving up on the bureaucracy, a pharmacy tech kindly volunteered to help me wade through the obstacle course. If she had not done so, I would have walked out of the store.

In hindsight, one can at least theorize why the lawyers have made so many of the rest of us miserable. While the number of patients who have bad outcomes from vaccinations is tiny, there actually are a few, and some of them are sue-crazy. This seems especially true of the anti-vaxxer crowd who have bought into misinformation they have been fed, even by government officials (Robert F Kennedy Junior comes prominently to mind) concerning vaccines and autism or heart problems. My complaint here is also partly that lawyers have sued the wrong villains. They should be focusing on sources of anti-vaccination misinformation, rather than helping the fraudsters drown the rest of us. After all, the principle “first do no avoidable harm” should apply to lawyers as well as doctors, should it not?

William Shakespeare famously wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” in his play Henry VI, Part 2 (Act IV, Scene 2) as a line spoken by the character Dick the Butcher. Though the line was not intended to actually advocate for mass murder, we can still sympathize.

The entire process of registering for vaccinations might be boiled down to two or three simple questions.

• Have you ever had a bad reaction to any vaccine or other injection and if so, which one?
• Do you affirm that you are actively requesting vaccination and will hold the deliverer thereof blameless if you turn out to be one of the extremely rare people who have bad outcomes from it?

In my informed opinion, the rest of the rigmarole is simply word noise invented to make lawyers richer while protecting doctors from lawsuits, but not their patients from harm.

Richard A. Lawhern is a nationally recognized health care educator and patient advocate who has spent nearly three decades researching pain management and addiction policy. His extensive body of work, including over 300 published papers and interviews, reflects a deep critique of U.S. health care agencies and their approaches to chronic pain treatment. Now retired from formal academic and hospital affiliations, Richard continues to engage with professional and public audiences through platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and his contributions to KevinMD. His advocacy extends to online communities like Protect People in Pain, where he works to elevate the voices of patients navigating restrictive opioid policies. Among his many publications is a guideline on opioid use for chronic non-cancer pain, reflecting his commitment to evidence-based reform in pain medicine.