RFK Jr. and HHS sued by leading medical groups over ‘unlawful, unilateral’ changes to vaccine policies
On July 7, a coalition of the nation’s leading and most respected medical organizations joined together to file a lawsuit over HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s vaccine policies, claiming that Kennedy’s revisions to earlier working policies constitute an assault on public health.
Yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American College of Physicians (ACP), American Public Health Association (APHA), Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), Massachusetts Public Health Alliance (MPHA), Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM), and a pregnant physician, filed suit in American Academy of Pediatrics v. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts to defend vaccine policy, and to put an end to the Secretary’s assault on science, public health and evidence-based medicine.
Plaintiffs in the case are suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and R.F. Kennedy for acting arbitrarily and capriciously when he unilaterally changed Covid-19 vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant people. Kennedy has also unjustly dismissed 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and appointed replacements who have historically espoused anti-vaccine viewpoints. That advisory committee has proceeded to undermine the science behind vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit asks for preliminary and permanent injunctions to enjoin Secretary Kennedy’s rescissions of Covid vaccine recommendations and a declaratory judgment pronouncing the change in recommendations as unlawful.
“This administration is an existential threat to vaccination in America, and those in charge are only just getting started. If left unchecked, Secretary Kennedy will accomplish his goal of ridding the United States of vaccines, which would unleash a wave of preventable harm on our nation’s children,” said Richard H. Hughes IV, partner at Epstein Becker Green and lead counsel for the plaintiffs. “The professional associations for pediatricians, internal medicine physicians, infectious disease physicians, high-risk pregnancy physicians, and public health professionals will not stand idly by as our system of prevention is dismantled. This ends now.”
The lawsuit charges that a coordinated set of actions by HHS and Secretary Kennedy were designed to mislead, confuse, and gradually desensitize the public to anti-vaccine and anti-science rhetoric, and that he has routinely flouted federal procedural rules. These actions include blocking CDC communications, unexplained cancellations of vaccine panel meetings at the FDA and CDC, announcing studies to investigate non-existent links between vaccines and autism, unilaterally overriding immunization recommendations, and replacing the diverse members of ACIP with a slate of individuals biased against sound vaccine facts.
The anonymous individual plaintiff in the lawsuit is a pregnant woman who has been blocked from getting the Covid-19 vaccine booster since the Secretarial Directive, despite her high risk for exposure to infectious diseases from working as a physician at a hospital.
The plaintiff organizations urge parents and patients to follow their qualified medical professionals’ vaccine guidance. AAP, ACP, APHA, IDSA, and SMFM websites provide evidence-based resources to help patients make decisions grounded in facts, not fear.
For more on the lawsuit filed against RFK Jr. and HHS, see the video below.
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(Source: IDSA)
Posted by Richard Webster, Ace News Today
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