In a major blow to the Trump administration’s health agenda, a Massachusetts federal judge has blocked the US Government from implementing a series of decisions on vaccines made over the past year by Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, reports The New York Times.
The ruling also reversed, at least temporarily, all decisions made by the panellists appointed by Kennedy to the Advisory Committee for Immunisation Practices (ACIP), which makes recommendations on which vaccines Americans should take.
The court decision will prevent the committee from meeting later this week, as it was scheduled to do.
The judge’s ruling brought an abrupt halt to the major changes set in motion by Kennedy, which disrupted national vaccine policy amid sweeping revisions to the recommendations for which shots are given and when.
Those included cutting down the number of diseases covered by routine immunisation, and restricting access to Covid vaccines, two pillars of Kennedy’s vaccine agenda.
In his decision, Judge Brian Murphy, for the District of Massachusetts, noted that the vaccine committee has historically made decisions through careful review of scientific evidence, “a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements”.
“But unfortunately, the government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions,” he added.
The ruling will almost certainly be appealed.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said: “HHS looks forward to this judge’s decision being overturned, just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing.”
Murphy made the ruling in a lawsuit brought by six medical organisations, which contended Kennedy and his appointees had made “arbitrary and capricious” changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, bypassing the careful, evidence-based practice that in the past has underpinned the recommendations.
The lawsuit also argued that the panellists appointed by Kennedy did not have the qualifications to recommend vaccinations and that their decisions endangered the health of Americans.
In his decision, Murphy wrote that only six of the 15 panellists “appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines – the very focus of ACIP”.
Lawyers for the federal government, for their part, had argued that changes to the vaccination schedule represented reasonable disagreements about health policy. They noted that the states, and not the vaccine committee or the federal government, are the ultimate authority in decisions about which vaccines are required.
In a hearing this month, Isaac Belfer, a lawyer for the Trump administration, argued that Kennedy and the committee had “unreviewable” – or absolute – authority to make vaccine policies, even if that included recommending that people become infected with measles instead of getting vaccinated.
Murphy was clear in his dismissal of that argument. “Suffice it to say that the court disagrees,” he said.
The decision was the clearest outcome yet in an escalating battle between the medical establishment and the Health Department, which under Kennedy has embraced anti-vaccine conspiracies, including debunked theories that childhood shots cause autism, asthma or other diseases.
The lawsuit was filed in July by the medical organisations, including the American Academy of Paediatrics, after Kennedy announced on social media that Covid vaccines would no longer be recommended for healthy children or pregnant women.
The organisations had asked the court to restore the immunisation schedule from a year ago, before Kennedy began making revisions.
“The goal is to stop dangerous vaccine policies and to restore science to our nation’s vaccine decision-making,” said Mark Del Monte, chief executive of the American Academy of Paediatrics.
The lawsuit addressed a series of changes made by Kennedy and his associates over the past year. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 previous members of the vaccine committee and selected new panellists, most of whom shared his scepticism of vaccines and mandates.
In three meetings since then, the panellists rescinded several recommendations for childhood shots, including the immunisation of all newborns against hepatitis B.
Separately, Jim O’Neill, whom Kennedy had installed as the CDC’s acting director at the time, announced a new schedule for childhood vaccines in January that rescinded recommendations for some shots, effectively reducing the number of diseases against which children are routinely immunised to 11 from 17.
The revision of the schedule bypassed the vaccine panel entirely. Changes to the vaccination schedule are typically made by the vaccination committee after a careful review of the benefits and potential risks, in a process that can take months or years, said Dr Giridhar Mallya, a senior policy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which supports universal healthcare.
Many of the members Kennedy appointed are physicians, but unlike previous panellists, they have little to no expertise in vaccines or immunology.
Last month, the vaccine panel’s chair, Dr Kirk Milhoan, a paediatric cardiologist, suggested that all childhood vaccines, including the shots against polio and measles, should be optional, because the diseases no longer pose the dangers they once did – a position most public health experts immediately denounced as dangerous.
Other committee members have suggested, contrary to the scientific consensus, that Covid shots are deadly, and should be taken off the market. Allowing the panelists to make decisions about vaccines is “just as reckless as letting a group of amateur pilots dictate how our aeroplanes should fly”, said Dr Tina Hartert, a co-chair of the American Thoracic Society’s vaccine advisory committee. “The stakes in both scenarios are life and death.”
The New York Times article – Judge Strikes Down Kennedy’s Vaccine Policies (Restricted access)
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