Several medical organizations have filed a lawsuit against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, claiming that recent actions committed by the secretary and the agency constitute a “public health emergency requiring urgent legal intervention and remediation.”
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
The legal challenge comes in response to the new vaccine measures enacted by Secretary Kennedy, including the dismissal of the former vaccine advisory panel and the withdrawal of official recommendations endorsing mRNA COVID-19 vaccinations for children and pregnant women.
“He’s doing everything he possibly can to undermine vaccine confidence,” stated Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, one organization joining the lawsuit. “Quite frankly, we’ve had enough.”
Richard Hughes, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, admitted that it was Kennedy’s late-May post on X—where he rejected the CDC’s vaccine recommendation that children and pregnant women receive the COVID-19 shot and boosters—as the “final straw” prompting legal action.
The suing parties are now “asking the court to order the secretary to announce on X that those immunization recommendations are now reinstated to the CDC immunization schedules,” Hughes noted in a briefing on Monday.
During the briefing, American Academy of Pediatrics President Dr. Susan Kressly chimed in to argue that “our immunization system has long been a cornerstone of U.S. public health, but actions by the current administration are jeopardizing its success.”
Dr. Tina Tan, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), another plaintiff in the lawsuit, also asserted that “the only acceptable number of dead children from COVID is zero.”
Others participating in the suit include the American College of Physicians, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance.
An unnamed pregnant woman, who was presumably introduced to the joint legal matter by a doctor involved in the suit, is named as a plaintiff as well. According to NBC News, she had expressed concern that recent changes to the vaccination schedule could “prevent her” from receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, despite the numerous times RFK Jr. has stated that those vaccines are here to stay, even if they will no longer be on the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule.
The schedule includes routine vaccines for Hepatitis B, DTaP, Hib, PCV, IPV, MMR, Varicella, Hepatitis A, HPV, meningococcal, and annual influenza.
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