Public health groups file lawsuit to stop RFK Jr.’s vaccine changes
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. violated the law and imperiled public health when he withdrew some public health recommendations about coronavirus vaccines, a coalition of medical associations alleged in a lawsuit filed Monday.
The lawsuit against Kennedy and other top government health officials seeks to overturn Kennedy’s decision in May to end the government’s long-standing blanket recommendation that children and pregnant women should receive the shots.
The reversal made it difficult for some pregnant women to get vaccinated to protect themselves and their future children, according to the health groups that filed the lawsuit. Medical professionals rely on – and are sometimes legally bound by – federal vaccine recommendations to decide whom to immunize.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine are among the organizations that joined forces to file the lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts.
Their lawsuit escalates efforts by public health organizations to preserve access to vaccines now under scrutiny by Kennedy, who founded an anti-vaccine organization.
“He’s actively undermining vaccine safety and efficacy and confidence in vaccines by everything he’s done,” said Georges C. Benjamin, the leader of the American Public Health Association, one of the plaintiffs.
A spokesman for HHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit. HHS has previously defended Kennedy’s rollback of coronavirus vaccine recommendations, arguing that he was “taking urgent action to ensure the public’s safety when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines.”
In response to Kennedy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shifted from recommending the vaccine to healthy children to encouraging parents to consult their doctors.
The agency also stopped offering specific guidance to pregnant women, a decision that medical providers have said caused confusion and limited women’s access to the shots.
The move effectively blocked pharmacists from providing coronavirus vaccines to pregnant women in more than half of U.S. states, said Brigid Groves, vice president of professional affairs at the American Pharmacists Association, which is not part of the lawsuit. Under the rules of those states, the authority of pharmacists to offer vaccines is tied to federal immunization recommendations, she said.
“Their hands are tied,” Groves said. “Pharmacists are being forced to turn away pregnant patients who want a vaccine we know is safe and could protect them and their babies because the law won’t let them give it.”
In late May, Kennedy posted a 58-second video on X saying that the coronavirus vaccine would no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant women. He was flanked by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health, who are also named as defendants in the lawsuit.
The unprecedented move bypassed the traditional system for offering vaccine advice to the public and blindsided officials at the CDC, the agency charged with offering such recommendations.
The lawsuit includes an anonymous pregnant physician who says it will be “more difficult” to access the coronavirus vaccine. It asks a judge to set aside Kennedy’s coronavirus vaccine directives and urges the court to order Kennedy to say on X that the vaccine recommendations are restored for pregnant women and children. It also seeks to immediately prevent the government from enforcing the new recommendations.
The lawsuit contends that Kennedy “has demonstrated a clear pattern of hostility toward established scientific processes, a disregard for expert guidance, an affinity for placing persons who align with his anti-vaccination views in positions of authority at HHS and a reliance on bias and pretext to further his apparent agenda: to undermine trust in vaccines and reduce the rate of vaccinations in this country.”
The plaintiffs argue that Kennedy – who has a long history of disparaging vaccination – has undercut vaccines in an “arbitrary” and “capricious” way without following proper federal agency policy, giving them grounds for the lawsuit under the Administrative Procedure Act.
In a May document explaining his decision, Kennedy argued there was not enough data on the benefits of vaccination and the safety of immunization during pregnancy.
The lawsuit decries Kennedy’s removal of vaccine advisers whom he replaced with panel members he named in June. It argues that pregnant women and their infants are at high risk from coronavirus complications, citing evidence presented at a vaccine panel meeting held before Kennedy acted.