The vaccine policy of RFK Jr. leads to a lawsuit of the American Academy of Pediatrics

A handful of leading medical organizations complains health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about recent changes in federal COVID-19 vaccine recommendations of what they characterize as a greater effort to undermine the trust in vaccines among the American public.

The groups behind the complaint, Posted Monday In the Federal District Court, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the American Public Health Association.

The lawsuit focuses on the decision of Kennedy to remove pregnant women and healthy children from the COVID-19 vaccine schedule at the end of May. The lawsuit claims that this was “random” and “fickle” and contrary to the federal legislation that rules how these decisions are made.

The complaint asks the court to reverse the changes in the vaccine recommendations and to declare them illegally.

“In recent months, experts have been sidelined, evidence has been undermined and the vaccine infrastructure of our nation is now threatened,” Dr. Susan KresslyPresident of the American Academy of Pediatrics, reporters said on Monday.

“The health of every child is at stake,” she said.

In a statement to NPR, Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Human Services, said: “The secretary is at his CDC reforms.”

The lawsuit was brought in Massachusetts because several of the claimants who were affected were there, said Richard H. Hughes IVThe chief advisor for the medical groups that sue the federal government.

One of the claimants, for example, only identified as “Jane Doe” in the complaint, is a pregnant doctor who works in a hospital in Massachusetts and says she fears that she will not be able to get a Covid vaccine.

The complaints of 42 pages of catalogs many of Kennedy’s actions about the vaccine policy since he adopts leadership at HHS, including the removal of the entire schedule of experts from a federal vaccine advice committee and replacing it with its own choices.

James Hodge is the director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University and is not involved in the lawsuit. Hodge said that the case ultimately depends on the allegations that Kennedy and other leaders of federal health agencies have violated the Action Procedure Act under his competence, which determines how changes in vaccine recommendations should be made. These changes include a process in which the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices or ACIP is involved whose original members Kennedy started.

“The complaint here makes a plausible matter that they have not followed the correct procedures at all, related to ACIP recommendations,” says Hodge. “That is where the court should take this case seriously.”