Medical Groups Sue HHS Regarding Changes to COVID Vaccine Policy

Six medical groups have sued HHS and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for “acting ‘arbitrarily and capriciously’ in making recent changes to COVID-19 vaccine policy.” CIDRAP has the news.

The groups that signed onto the lawsuit are “the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American Public Health Association (APHA), the Infectious Diseases Society of America (ISDA), Massachusetts Public Health Alliance (MPHA), and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM).”

The letter comes after several controversial moves made by Kennedy without input from federal vaccine groups. Notably, Kennedy significantly reduced which groups receive a CDC recommendation for COVID-19 vaccines, and he removed 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with eight new people, including “several of [his] anti-vaccine allies.”

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say that the dismissal of the ACIP members was unjust and that the committee has “undermined the science behind vaccine recommendations” since they left. On June 26, Kennedy’s hand-picked panel “recommended against receiving flu vaccines that contain the preservative thimerosal, reviving a hot-button topic of anti-vaccine groups. More than 40 studies over many decades have found no link between thimerosal and developmental delays.” The lawsuit requests permanent injunctions to halt Kennedy’s COVID vaccine recommendations. The groups also expressed alarm about other recommendations, saying they were “founded in fear and not evidence.”