An alliance of medical organizations filed a lawsuit Monday against Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other top health officials, claiming Kennedy shows “a clear pattern of hostility toward established scientific processes” and has an agenda to “undermine trust in vaccines and reduce the rate of vaccinations in this country.”
The lawsuit’s plaintiffs include the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American College of Physicians, Inc., the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Massachusetts Public Health Association, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.
The complaint, filed in US District Court in Massachusetts, names Kennedy, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Acting Director Matthew Buzzelli, as defendants.
“This administration is an existential threat to vaccination in America, and those in charge are only just getting started,” Richard H. Hughes IV, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “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.”
“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,” Hughes added. “This ends now.”
The coalition of medical groups is taking issue with Kennedy’s statement in his May 27 post on the X site in which he asserted the removal of the COVID shot “for healthy children and healthy pregnant women” from the CDC’s “recommended immunization schedule” amounted to “common sense” and “good science.”
In their filing, the plaintiffs asked the court to “declare unlawful” the directive removing the COVID product for healthy children and pregnant women from the vaccine schedule.
Kennedy’s assessment, the plaintiffs claimed, is a “baseless and uninformed policy decision” that puts “pregnant women, their unborn children, and, in fact, all children” at “grave and immediate risk of contracting a preventable disease.”
“This decision immediately exposes these vulnerable populations to a serious illness with potentially irreversible long-term effects and, in some cases, death,” the medical groups asserted, adding that the move represents “but one example of the Secretary’s agenda to dismantle the longstanding, Congressionally-authorized, science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans.”
The plaintiffs claimed Kennedy’s decision to “retire” all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replace them with eight new members was highly disruptive.
While Kennedy described the new ACIP members as “highly credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians,” the plaintiffs claimed they are “individuals opposed to settled science,” and that most “do not possess the required scientific and medical expertise to serve on ACIP.”
Among those ACIP members the medical groups denigrated as not possessing sufficient expertise is Martin Kulldorff, M.D., Ph.D. – unnamed in the lawsuit itself but clearly identified as one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Kulldorff is a former Harvard University biostatistician and epidemiologist and a leading expert in vaccine safety and infectious disease surveillance. In the Great Barrington Declaration, he and his co-authors argued against mandatory universal pandemic lockdowns and in favor of age-based focused protection for the elderly combined with letting children and young adults live their lives normally.
Kulldorff was forced out of Harvard for daring to dissent from the prevailing pandemic narratives.
In their criticism of Kulldorff, AAP and the other plaintiffs described him in their filing as “a coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration that promoted ‘natural immunity’ over public health measures; who opposed vaccination in children against Covid, as well as masking, lockdowns and vaccine mandates; and who lost positions at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard after refusing to get vaccinated.”
Also mentioned by the plaintiffs as an apparent ally was Louisiana Republican US Senator Bill Cassidy – described by Health Freedom Louisiana as a “liberal industry apologist,” in reference to his support for the pharmaceutical industry.
Less than two days before the newly reformed ACIP was scheduled for its first meeting in June, Cassidy called for a delay, claiming some members lacked “experience studying new technologies such as mRNA vaccines” and had “a preconceived bias against them.”
“The Secretary did not delay the ACIP meeting as Senator Cassidy suggested and the newly restacked ACIP met on June 25–26, 2025 in Atlanta,” the lawsuit noted.
According to a recent poll, however, most parents of young children support a reevaluation of the current immunization schedule.
Results of the poll, conducted by John Zogby Strategies and released July 1, found that, of over 1,000 registered voters, 60% of parents with young children support reviewing the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule.
The survey, commissioned by Children’s Health Defense, showed that 49% say the current immunization schedule should be reevaluated, while 21% are undecided, and only 30% want to keep the current schedule.
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Author: Susan Berry, Ph.D.
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