U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston ruled that Kennedy’s sweeping agenda to upend childhood vaccination policies was unlawful and threatened public health. He also effectively paused the operations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which was recently stuffed with vaccine skeptics. It was supposed to convene for a meeting on Wednesday.
“While the appointments of the challenged members of ACIP are stayed, ACIP as currently constituted cannot meet, for how can a committee meet without nearly the entirety of its membership?” Murphy, a Biden appointee, wrote.
Murphy also blocked HHS’s Jan. 5 decision to downgrade several childhood vaccines from “routine” recommendations to “shared clinical decision-making,” reducing the number of routine vaccines from 17 to 11.
The lawsuit challenging HHS was brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups, who argued that Kennedy was acting in an unscientific and unlawful manner. His skepticism about certain vaccines has long raised alarms among many child health advocates.
Murphy wrote on Monday that the United States had relied on vaccines to eradicate harmful diseases for decades and developed them through “a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements.”
Kennedy’s HHS, meanwhile, “has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”
TRUMP’S DEREGULATORY TRIUMPHS AND THE RFK JR. PROBLEM
The plaintiffs also successfully argued that Kennedy’s decision to replace all 17 ACIP members and staff them with those closer to his views violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires the committee to be unbiased and free of outside influence.
The plaintiffs took a victory lap after the ruling, with their lawyer, Richard Hughes, hailing it as “a great victory not only for vaccines and public health in the United States, but for science.”
