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Top Medical Organizations Warn RFK Jr. Putting American Kids 'At Grave and Immediate Risk'
"Truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary... he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies," stated a new lawsuit.
Jul 07, 2025
Six major medical organizations on Monday filed a lawsuit against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alleging he is putting American children at "grave and immediate risk" because of his policy on vaccines.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit—including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Massachusetts Public Health Association, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine—charged that Kennedy earlier this year made a "baseless and uninformed policy decision" when he removed vaccinations against Covid-19 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) official immunization schedule for "healthy" children and pregnant women.
The organizations emphasized that unless Kennedy's decision is reversed, "all children remain at grave and immediate risk of contracting a preventable disease" and further warned that it "exposes... vulnerable populations to a serious disease with potentially irreversible long-term effects and, in some cases, death."
The plaintiffs further charged that Kennedy's directive removing the Covid-19 vaccines from the immunization schedule was "but one example of the secretary's agenda to dismantle the longstanding... science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans."
The complaint then documented Kennedy's long history of statements and articles that have peddled false claims about the safety of vaccinations and pointed to his mass dismissals of staff at HHS and his appointment of likeminded vaccine critics to argue that "it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies."
Given this, the plaintiffs argued that Kennedy's decision to remove the Covid-19 vaccine from immunization schedules was "arbitrary and capricious" based on what they described as "vast and irrefutable evidence," including congressional testimony delivered by Kennedy in which he acknowledged that people shouldn't "be taking medical advice from me"; that Kennedy's directive directly contradicted an article published by the Food and Drug Administration days earlier stating that pregnancy was a condition that "increased a person's risk of severe Covid-19"; and that Kennedy did not identify specific recommendations from professional staff that he used as justification to restrict the availability of the vaccine.
Should courts find that Kennedy's decision was "arbitrary and capricious" as alleged by the plaintiffs, they would have the power to enjoin the policy under the Administrative Procedures Act, which was also employed recently to halt planned mass layoffs at HHS. The medical organizations urged courts to declare Kennedy's policy change "unlawful" and demanded "the restoration of the Covid vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children ages six months to 17 years" of age.
The medical organizations' lawsuit against Kennedy's vaccination policy comes at a time when infections of measles in the United States have hit a level not seen in more than three decades. The Washington Post, citing data from Johns Hopkins University, reported on Monday that there have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles so far in the U.S. this year and the paper noted that this development "marks a public health reversal in defeating a highly contagious, vaccine-preventable disease as the anti-vaccine movement gains strength."
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RFK Jr.’s Guide to Making America Sick Again
Building on his longstanding anti-vaxxing crusade, Kennedy has followed a multi-step program that will worsen the next outbreak.
Jun 15, 2025
Someone should have told Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the last pandemic probably cost him the presidency in 2020.
Building on his longstanding anti-vaxxing crusade, Kennedy has followed a three-step program that will worsen the next outbreak.
Step 1: Reduce vaccine availability. Three weeks ago, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—one of Kennedy’s HHS agencies—announced that for healthy Americans under 65, Covid-19 vaccines will not be approved until they pass large scale and time-consuming clinical trials. That is a daunting obstacle.
Kennedy said that the firings were necessary to restore public trust in vaccines. They do the opposite.
Step 2: Reduce vaccine eligibility. The following week, Kennedy announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend the Covid-19 vaccine for children and pregnant women. Within days, the CDC had to walk it back somewhat, stating that whether to vaccinate a child should be the product of “shared decision-making” involving parents and physicians. But pregnant women remain in the limbo world of “no recommendation.” In any event, the negative impact on overall public health will be enormous.
Step 3: Eliminate vaccine expertise. On June 9, Kennedy fired the entire CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—all 17 of them. This committee of outside experts reviews the most recent data on all vaccines to assess safety, efficacy, and clinical need. It develops a recommended guidance schedule for all vaccines, including seasonal flu shots and Covid-19 boosters. Physicians rely on that guidance in counseling patients, and insurance companies and government programs use it to determine the vaccines they will cover. Committee members received their termination notices via email sent two hours after Kennedy announced their firing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
With Kennedy’s selection of his first eight replacements on June 11, we’re getting a sense of the disaster that will accompany Step 4.
Action Based on Lies
Kennedy’s stated justifications for terminating every member of the vaccine advisory committee are a combination of lies, half-truths, and misinformation.
Fact: Committee members are screened for major conflicts of interest. They cannot hold stock or serve on advisory boards or bureaus affiliated with vaccine manufacturers. If members have a conflict of interest, they disclose it and recuse themselves from related votes.
Lie: But Kennedy asserted falsely that most members of the committee had received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies. “The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” he said falsely.
Fact: Individual working groups may meet in private, but committee meetings and members’ materials are public. Over several days of meetings, they review safety and effectiveness data, debate policy, hear from experts, and entertain public comment.
Lie: Kennedy asserted falsely that the committee worked secretly “behind closed doors.”
Misinformation/half-truth: According to The New York Times, “Kennedy claimed that 97% of financial disclosure forms from committee members had omissions. But the statistic came from an inspector general’s report in 2009, which found that 97% of the forms had errors, such as missing dates or information in the wrong section, not significant financial conflicts.”
Kennedy said that the firings were necessary to restore public trust in vaccines. They do the opposite. Thanks in large measure to Kennedy’s years of anti-vaxxing leadership, support for vaccinating children is eroding. Now he can stack the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee—the key medical and scientific body responsible for determining which vaccines protect and promote public health.
Seen Enough Yet, Sen. Cassidy?
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the physician who reluctantly provided the key vote that resulted in Kennedy’s Senate confirmation, sees the mess. He was instrumental in creating it. Cassidy could have killed Kennedy’s nomination and thought seriously about doing so.
But like almost all Republicans in the Senate, his spine failed him. Before voting on Kennedy’s nomination, Sen. Cassidy took the Senate floor to explain his decision. He said that Kennedy had assured him that, if confirmed, he would “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes.”
Reacting to Kennedy’s mass firings, Sen. Cassidy posted on X:
“Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion…”
Two days later, Sen. Cassidy’s fears came to life.
On June 11, Kennedy named eight replacements. Among them are anti-vaccine activists, conspiracy theorists, vaccine misinformation promoters, a co-author of and a signatory to the pandemic-era Great Barrington Declaration that recommended widespread exposure to Covid-19 as strategy for dealing with the outbreak (instead of widespread vaccination), and individuals who lack the expertise required for the board’s task. One new member testified as an expert witness in a case against Merck over its Gardasil vaccine (for HPV)—mass tort litigation that Kennedy played a key role in organizing.
Steps 5, 6,…
Kennedy included 4 of the 8 new members in the dedication of his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci. Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a physician and scientist who reviewed it for the Claremont Review of Books, observed, “When I looked up at random five of the medical papers Kennedy cites, I found that he had misrepresented all of them… He asserts things that are simply not true.”
Kennedy is at it again. Announcing his selections on X, he wrote, “The slate includes highly credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians.”
Do you agree, Sen. Cassidy?
Kennedy’s vaccine advisory committee meets on June 25-27. We should all fear the outcome.
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RFK Jr.’s Deadly War on Science
Kennedy is not a doctor or a scientist, but he got the job as America’s top public health officer. Now he’s making the wrong choices for all of us.
Jun 06, 2025
During an NBC interview on November 6, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was cleaning up his lifelong anti-vaccination act as he lobbied to become Health and Human Services secretary in the Trump administration.
“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away,” he said. “People ought to have choice…”
Kennedy is not a doctor or a scientist, but he got the job as America’s top public health officer. Now he’s making the wrong choices for all of us.
What Happened
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) report to Kennedy. As with flu shots, the agencies have approved and recommended Covid-19 vaccines as they have been adjusted annually to deal with the evolving virus.
On May 20, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, announced a new obstacle to FDA approval of any Covid-19 vaccine. For healthy Americans under 65, it must be subjected to large scale and time-consuming clinical trials. That data will replace the prior requirement of evidence showing only an immune response, which was the basis for approving the initial “Project Warp Speed” vaccines and all subsequent boosters.
Makary and Prasad asserted that they’re merely requiring “gold-standard data on persons at low risk.” But by not requiring such randomized, placebo-controlled trials for the elderly and other high-risk groups, they’re conceding that the vaccine prevents infection.
Even trying to follow the new requirement poses problems. It’s unethical to perform a clinical study that would give some people a worthless placebo instead of a vaccine, according to Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the University of Pennsylvania:
[W]e have a vaccine that works, given that we know that SARS-CoV2 continues to circulate and cause hospitalizations and death, and there’s no group that has no risk.
What Should Have Happened
Every year, the Advisory Committee on Immunizaton Practices to the CDC—a nonpartisan group of medical and scientific experts—considers the latest studies, data, and possible side effects of both old and new vaccines. It develops recommendations that the CDC’s director can accept, modify, or reject.
The transparent process culminates in a schedule that pediatricians throughout the country use to decide the safest and most effective ages at which to vaccinate children. Insurance companies use the CDC schedule to determine the vaccines they will cover.
Kennedy didn’t wait for the Advisory Committee. Three days after the FDA’s announcement of its new approval requirement, Kennedy posted a video on X, with Commissioner Makary at his side:
I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that as of today the Covid-19 vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule.
The blowback from the medical community was immediate. Every week in the United States, Covid-19 still kills 300 people and hundreds more are hospitalized. It’s the fourth leading cause of death overall and in the top 10 among children. And a new strain surging in Asia has now arrived here.
On May 30, the CDC walked back Kennedy’s proclamation with an update: For children between six months and 17 years old, the CDC now recommends “shared decision-making” between the physician and the patient or patient and guardian in determining whether to get the vaccine.
Healthy adults are still off the CDC’s list. And for pregnant women—all of whom are at greater risk of Covid-19 complications—the CDC’s positions are internally contradictory. Its new schedule no longer recommends that they get vaccinated. But the CDC continues to recommend the vaccine to anyone with “underlying conditions”—one of which is pregnancy. Meanwhile newborns who depend on their vaccinated mothers for immunity have the same likelihood of hospitalization and death from Covid-19 as someone who is 70 years old.
What Happens When Republicans Fear Trump More Than Endangering Public Health
Exhaustive studies have demonstrated that the vaccine is effective across all age groups. According to data published by the National Institutes of Health—another agency that Kennedy supervises—it has prevented millions of hospitalizations and saved millions of lives.
During Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked Kennedy to acknowledge that the Covid-19 vaccine had saved millions of people.
“I don’t think anybody can say that,” Kennedy replied.
Now, as with many Trump policies, the cost of a Covid-19 vaccine will hit hardest those adults who can least afford it. But when they don’t get vaccinated, the public at large will bear the consequences.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician, expressed concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. But he overcame those reservations, perhaps because Republican primary challengers on the right were already telling Louisiana voters in the upcoming election that Cassidy was insufficiently loyal to Trump. After voting to convict Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection, the Louisiana Republican Party’s executive committee censured him.
Cassidy said that he voted to confirm Kennedy only after “intense conversations” that included Kennedy’s promise to “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations without changes.”
Until Kennedy broke that promise, the decision to get a Covid-19 vaccine was an individual choice. To promote public health, the vaccine’s presence on the CDC’s guidance schedule assured that it would be free to those who wanted it.
Now, as with many Trump policies, the cost of a Covid-19 vaccine will hit hardest those adults who can least afford it. But when they don’t get vaccinated, the public at large will bear the consequences: More Americans will be hospitalized with Covid-19 and more will die.
Blame Kennedy, of course, but he is who he always has been. Trump and Senate Republicans—especially Sen. Cassidy—knew it when they gave him the job that is killing us.
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