Medical and public health organisations have sued the United States Department of Health and Human Services and its Secretary over changes to the country’s vaccine policy, asking the courts to restore the Centre for Disease Control’s recommendation to vaccinate children and pregnant women against Covid-19, reports Medpage Today.
The groups focused on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s directive to end the CDC’s recommendation to issue the shots to these categories, but also listed numerous actions they say undermine American vaccine policy. That included removing all 17 of the CDC’s top vaccine advisers and cancelling or postponing vaccine advisory meetings.
Plaintiffs included the American Public Health Association, the Society for Maternal-Foetal Medicine (SMFM), the American Academy of Paediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the American College of Physicians and the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance.
A pregnant physician who wasn’t able to get a Covid shot also joined the lawsuit, which said the directive preventing members’ high-risk pregnant patients from accessing the Covid-19 vaccine raises the risk of serious infection and illness and erodes patient trust in all recommended vaccinations.
Other Trump administration officials and their agencies were named in the lawsuit, including FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, Director Jay Bhattacharya and Matthew Buzzelli, the apparent acting director of the CDC.
The groups also detailed a host of other actions they said undermined public trust in vaccines, and included details from practising physicians who felt they are compromising the standard of care they should be providing to their patients, a paediatrician who is grappling with an increase in vaccine hesitancy among her patient families, and another who said she’s limited in her ability to consistently stock Covid shots for children.
The pregnant physician who joined the lawsuit has remained anonymous, but the complaint said she was blocked from getting a Covid booster “despite her high risk for exposures to infectious diseases from working as a hospital doctor”.
In addition to asking for the court to restore the CDC’s previous recommendations to vaccinate healthy children and pregnant women against Covid, the lawsuit requested that Kennedy post the restored schedule on X.
Medpage Today article – Pregnant Doc, Medical Groups Sue Over Kennedy's New Vax Recs (Open access)
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