WASHINGTON — Six major medical groups, and a pregnant physician, are suing health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over changes he made to Covid-19 vaccine recommendations that they say were unlawful and undermine public trust in health care.
The suit argues that a May 19 directive signed by Kennedy, which said that the Covid-19 vaccine would no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant people, violates decades of policy governing how vaccines are reviewed, approved, and recommended in the U.S.
“The Secretary cited no emergency, let alone change in circumstances, to justify the directive … [the directive] is contrary to the wealth of data and peer-reviewed studies that demonstrate the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines for children and pregnant women,” reads the suit, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics and filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Other plaintiffs are the American College of Physicians, American Public Health Association, Infectious Diseases Society of America, Massachusetts Public Health Alliance, Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and the pregnant physician. The latter plaintiff, an unnamed woman who works in a Massachusetts hospital, says the policy change has created barriers to getting a Covid-19 vaccine, despite her exposure to illness at work, and has left her worried “for the health and safety of her unborn child,” per the suit.
The new policies described in the May directive from Kennedy — and later unveiled in a video in which he appeared alongside Marty Makary, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health — came without involvement of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the panel of vaccine experts that advise federal officials on who should get which vaccine. The CDC has no acting director.
HHS said in a statement that Kennedy “stands by his CDC reforms.”
RFK Jr. says he has a team working on changes to the vaccine injury compensation program
In the weeks since he signed the directive, Kennedy has further dismantled and discredited the existing vaccine approval apparatus, first by dismissing 17 members of the panel known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, accusing them of being biased toward the pharmaceutical industry, and then by handpicking new members, including some with known anti-vaccine views.
The suit argues that these actions all represent a “coordinated set of actions … designed to mislead, confuse, and gradually desensitize the public to anti-vaccine and anti-science rhetoric,” according to a press release.
Kennedy’s actions have put physicians “in the untenable position of telling their patients that the country’s top-ranking government health official’s advice and recommendations are wrong and that we are right. This erodes trust,” the suit reads. The groups are calling for a judge to order Kennedy to restore the prior recommendations.
The suit comes after the Supreme Court last month upheld a key Affordable Care Act provision requiring health insurers to cover certain recommended preventive services cost-free. The court’s decision, however, also ratified a stronger role for the HHS secretary in overseeing the key expert panel that evaluates preventative services.
Richard Hughes, partner for Epstein Becker Green and counsel for plaintiffs, told reporters Monday that the high court did affirm that recommendations made by advisory committees need to be adopted or rejected by the secretary, giving Kennedy a lot of authority.
“However, it’s a question of how he wields that authority,” Hughes added. If “he’s not relying on sound science, if we’re seeing pretext and bias and we’re running roughshod over really important, long-standing processes and procedures, that’s arbitrary and capricious and that is unlawful.”
