By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, March 16 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday blocked key parts of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s effort to reshape U.S. vaccine policy, including a move to reduce the number of shots routinely recommended for children.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston sided with the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups, which said health regulators had acted unlawfully to carry out Kennedy’s agenda of upending immunization policies and warned the changes will reduce vaccination rates and harm public health.
The ruling dealt a significant setback for the reduced childhood vaccination schedule championed by Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist appointed last year by President Donald Trump to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Murphy said that for decades, the United States had been focused on the eradication and reduction of diseases using vaccines, which were developed through “a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements.” But he said that under Kennedy, the government “has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”
The judge, who was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden, also blocked Kennedy’s 13 appointees to a key vaccine advisory panel from continuing to serve in their positions ahead of a meeting set to take place on March 18-19 and upended votes they had previously taken to reshape vaccine policies.
“This is a significant victory for public health, evidence-based medicine, the rule of law, and the American people,” Richard Hughes, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “The government may appeal this decision, and we have much more work to do to achieve a full victory on the merits. But for now, we get to celebrate a rare bit of good news.”
Vaccine makers have grown increasingly wary of U.S. vaccine policy, including the makers of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna. Companies that make other shots on the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule include Merck, Sanofi and GSK.
As Kennedy’s policies have taken hold, pediatricians have faced parents increasingly skeptical about vaccines and medical treatments, while nearly a dozen states have begun considering legal changes that would relax vaccine requirements for school enrollment.
The judge has earned the scorn of Republican President Donald Trump and his allies for repeatedly blocking administration initiatives, including core parts of Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.
The plaintiffs had argued the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acted unlawfully when on January 5 it cut the number of routinely recommended childhood vaccinations to 11 and downgraded the immunization recommendations for six diseases, including rotavirus, influenza and hepatitis A.
They also challenged Kennedy’s decision last year to remove and replace all 17 independent experts who previously served on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which makes recommendations that shape U.S. vaccine practices and insurance coverage.
The plaintiffs had argued that the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, whose recommendations to the CDC help shape U.S. vaccine policy and insurance reimbursements, had become dominated by people aligned with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views and was constituted in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s mandates that it be fairly balanced and free of inappropriate influence.
Murphy said because it was unlawfully constituted, earlier votes by the panel to downgrade recommendations for hepatitis B vaccines for newborns and COVID-19 shots were also invalid.
Lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice argued that while HHS welcomed debate about vaccine policy, Kennedy and officials under him had broad authority to change it to address what they said was a decline in public trust in vaccines following the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Daniel Wallis and Bill Berkrot)
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