Hart v. Secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services

OPINION

ALLEGRA, Judge.

“It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.”

So said the medieval philosopher William of Occam, known for his popular razor, which can lead medical doctors to choose parsimoniously from a set of otherwise equivalent diagnoses the simplest one.2 But, is this simplest diagnosis always the right one — under the law?

In this vaccine case, before the court on petitioner’s motion for review, the diagnosis accepted by the Special Master hinged on probabilistic statistics that appeared to show that it was more likely that the tragic death of a young boy was not the…