A coalition of doctors’ groups led by the American Academy of Pediatrics filed a lawsuit Monday against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arguing that his May announcement that the government would no longer recommend Covid-19 vaccines for healthy pregnant people and children violated longstanding norms governing U.S. immunization policy.
The organizations say Kennedy’s May 19 “Secretarial Directive” documenting his move to pull the vaccine from the CDC’s immunization schedule constitutes a final agency action ripe for challenge, noting that he cited no emergency or specific circumstantial changes to support the move.
“The Secretarial 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,” the plaintiffs said in the lawsuit.
HHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Organizations on the challenge include the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
The directive, they wrote, has put doctors “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, which is the foundation of a healthy physician-patient relationship and vital to the success of AAP members’ medical practices,” they added.
Kennedy announced the change in a May 27 video posted to X, in which he was flanked by FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, both of whom gained notoriety during the Covid pandemic for their opposition to mask and vaccine mandates.
The three officials said there wasn’t sufficient data to show healthy children and healthy pregnant women benefited from Covid vaccination. “Most countries have stopped recommending it for children,” Makary said in the video.
The administration later distributed a document explaining the decision to lawmakers. The document said studies have shown that women who got the vaccine during pregnancy had higher rates of various complications, but authors of those studies told POLITICO that the administration had misinterpreted their results.
The plaintiffs in the case said Kennedy had unlawfully sidelined the CDC and its independent vaccine panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which are the federal bodies responsible for the immunization schedule.
“The statutory scheme that regulates the vaccine infrastructure in this country demonstrates Congress’ repeated policy decision to require that ACIP recommendations, made by a fairly balanced ACIP membership, 51 be the basis for what is put on or taken off of the CDC immunization schedules — not the unilateral decision of a single individual,” the plaintiffs wrote.
Public and private insurers are largely obligated to cover ACIP-recommended vaccines with no cost-sharing under the Affordable Care Act, and states often tie their daycare and school vaccine requirements to the panel’s recommendations.
While the CDC ultimately didn’t pull the recommendation from the childhood schedule, it did downgrade it to one involving “shared decisionmaking” — a differentiation the physician groups say has made it harder for providers to counsel patients and for practices to assess insurance coverage.
The lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Massachusetts, where a landmark vaccine policy case set national precedent in the early 20th century. The Supreme Court’s 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision upheld states’ authority to mandate vaccinations.
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