- Several health organizations and a pregnant doctor are suing the Trump administration over a new COVID-19 vaccination policy.
- The new policy withdraws the COVID-19 vaccine recommendation for most children and pregnant women made by earlier vaccination policy.
- Groups suing include the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Disease Society of America and the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association and several other groups filed a lawsuit Monday in federal court in Boston over the Trump administration’s new policy on COVID-19 vaccinations.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently announced it would no longer recommend COVID-19 vaccination or boosters for pregnant women or for most children.
The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association were joined in filing the lawsuit by the Infectious Disease Society of America, the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and a pregnant physician who is listed as “Jane Doe” in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit asks a judge to stop the changes made to COVID-19 vaccine policy.
Until this May, federal public health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that children over 6 months old and pregnant women get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus. Pregnant women were urged to do so in part to protect infants who were too young to receive the vaccine.
The new policy favors COVID-19 vaccination for those 65 and older or those with risk of severe symptoms, such as people with weak immune systems. HHS officials said the vaccines would “likely be available to 100 to 200 million Americans.” For others outside those risk categories, vaccine manufacturers would have to commit to further testing to show the vaccines are needed before they’d be licensed.
The expectation is that those who fall outside of the specific recommendations might not be able to access COVID-19 vaccines even if they want them.
Because health insurance companies, school policies and others regularly follow the CDC’s recommendations on vaccination, many health experts expressed concern that the vaccines would no longer be covered by insurance, making them unaffordable and less available.
Pushback on the new policy
According to The Associated Press, “Many health experts decried the move as confusing and accused Kennedy of disregarding the scientific review process that has been in place for decades — in which experts publicly review current medical evidence and hash out the pros and cons of policy changes.”
That refers to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the group that did that public review. Kennedy recently fired the entire 17-member panel, replacing them with new people, including several who have been publicly skeptical of vaccines in general.
In a news post, the pediatricians’ group accused Kennedy of making “unilateral, unscientific changes to federal vaccine policy.” They called it “an assault on science, public health and evidence-based medicine.”
“This isn’t just sidelining science,” head of the pediatrics academy Dr. Susan Kressly said in the post from her organization. “It’s an attack on the very foundation of how we protect families and children’s health. And the consequences could be dangerous.”
Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon told AP that Kennedy stands behind his decisions regarding the CDC panel and recommendations on vaccines.
The lawsuit accuses Kennedy of ignoring scientific evidence, as well as the established federal rulemaking process. It also says that he failed to make sure that the membership of the advisory committee represent a balance of viewpoints, instead skewing it toward vaccine skepticism. And per the academy’s news release, the lawsuit claims “the secretary blocked CDC communications, delayed or canceled meetings of CDC and Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisers and announced studies to investigate non-existent links between vaccines and autism.”
“We will not stand by while a single federal official unilaterally and effectively strips Americans of their choice to vaccinate with actions that thoroughly disregard overwhelming scientific evidence and decades of established federal processes,” Infectious Disease Society of America’s president, Dr. Tina Tan, said in a written statement.
The pediatricians’ group noted that it has in the past sued the federal government, without regard to which political party is in office. “In 1983, the AAP and other medical groups sued HHS over a rule related to life-sustaining treatment for infants with critical illness or disabilities. The AAP sued the FDA in 2016 and 2018. The first lawsuit was for delaying implementation of graphic warnings for cigarettes and the second was for delaying a review of e-cigarettes and cigars," per the news release.
In a separate news release from the American Public Health Association, lead counsel for the plaintiffs Richard H. Hughes IV of the law firm Epstein Becker Green called the administration “an existential threat to vaccination in America” and said that “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.“
He added that the parties to the lawsuit include professional associations for pediatricians, internal medicine physicians, infectious disease physicians, high-risk pregnancy physicians and public health professionals, noting they “will not stand idly by as our system of prevention is dismantled.”