RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Overhaul Faces Federal Judge

The Trump administration’s overhaul of vaccine recommendations will face a federal judge on Feb. 13.

Lawyers representing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and other government officials will appear in Boston before Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, along with attorneys for the American Academy of Pediatrics and other health organizations that are challenging the changes.

Plaintiffs want Murphy to block the government’s updated vaccine schedule for children, implemented with Kennedy’s support, as well as Kennedy’s revamping of a panel known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccines.

The CDC in January downgraded recommendations for six vaccines, citing in part how many peer countries do not widely recommend those shots.

The update to the childhood schedule “does not cite any new data that calls into question the safety or efficacy of any of the downgraded immunizations” and wrongly did not include input from ACIP, the plaintiffs said in a filing to Murphy.

They are also challenging Kennedy’s 2025 removal of all ACIP members and subsequent naming of new panelists.

Murphy in January ruled that the lawsuit could proceed, rejecting a government motion to dismiss the case.

Federal law states that advisory committees must not be “inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority or by any special interest” and that the committees must include a balance of views. The revamping of the committee violates that law, according to the plaintiffs, in part because Kennedy did not follow an ACIP document that aims at ensuring balanced membership.

“As a result, the Secretarial appointment process filled the ACIP with individuals publicly espousing similar (anti-vaccine) views and preconceived hypotheses that vaccines are categorically unsafe to the exclusion of vaccinologists, epidemiologists, and other expert specialists and clinicians who do not hold such views,” they said in the filing.

ACIP members include Dr. Cody Meissner, professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine, and Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the technology used in mRNA vaccines.

The January changes were made after President Donald Trump directed officials to review vaccine recommendations in other countries and to modify the U.S. schedule if appropriate. Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill signed off on the changes, pointing to an assessment authored by U.S. health officials Dr. Tracy Hoeg and Martin Kulldorff that found discrepancies between U.S. recommendations and those from peer nations, as well as advice from the heads of the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“It is black-letter law that ‘an agency must have discretion to rely on the reasonable opinions of its own qualified experts,'” government lawyers said in a response brief.

“And when an agency makes a ‘scientific determination’ that is ‘within its area of special expertise,’ ‘a reviewing court must generally be at its most deferential.'”

They said it was “eminently reasonable for the acting director to rely on the detailed scientific assessment of HHS officials and the recommendation of three HHS component heads—all highly experienced medical professionals.”

The government also disagreed with the allegation that ACIP is unfairly balanced, stating that the members “have a wide variety of employment histories and backgrounds.” The lawyers also said that in several votes, ACIP members have maintained broad recommendations for certain vaccines, including the influenza shot.

“Thus, Plaintiffs are not likely to show ACIP is ‘[un]fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented,’ … by categorically painting its members with a broad and nebulous ‘anti-vaccine’ brush, which does not accurately represent the members’ complex and nuanced perspectives and their committee voting records,” they wrote.