Doctors slam RFK Jr. for slashing Covid vaccine guidance

(CN) — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. placed children and pregnant women at “grave and immediate risk” with his May directive to remove them from the government’s blanket recommendation to receive Covid-19 vaccines, according to a coalition of public health associations.

The groups on Monday sued Kennedy and other government health officials, arguing that their call to exclude children and pregnant women from Covid-19 vaccine recommendations was “baseless and uninformed.”

“This decision immediately exposes these vulnerable populations to a serious illness with potentially irreversible long-term effects and, in some cases, death,” the groups claimed in a 42-page lawsuit. “This is not a hypothetical concern, but a pressing public health emergency that demands immediate legal action and correction.”

Kennedy, who has long been criticized for publicly exuding skepticism about a broad range of vaccines, promised during his Senate confirmation process that he would not discourage Americans from getting vaccinated.

The groups claim that Kennedy broke that vow when he announced on social media in May that he “couldn’t be more pleased that, as of today, the Covid vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedules.”

As a result, many physicians are turning away pregnant patients asking for the Covid-19 vaccine to comply with government rules, according to the lawsuit. One of the plaintiffs, identified only as Jane Doe — a nurse who is 20 weeks pregnant, decried Kennedy’s directive and claims it puts her in immediate danger.

“The directive creates barriers to access to the vaccine and has left Jane and her husband overwhelmed with stress and uncertainty,” she claims in the lawsuit. “Her worries are not just for herself, but also for the health and safety of her unborn child.”

Both newborn children and pregnant women are at an increased risk of serious infections from Covid-19 and other viruses; denying or denying access to vaccines for those infections is “medically dangerous and ethically indefensible,” the suing groups argue.

Organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine joined Doe as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Those groups are asking a court to reverse Kennedy’s changes to Covid-19 vaccine policy and restore any access barriers to immunizations that may have resulted from those changes.

“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 Diseases Society of America President Tina Tan, M.D., said in a statement Monday.

“These decisions are founded in fear and not evidence, and will make our children and communities more vulnerable to infectious diseases like measles, whooping cough, and influenza,” Tan added.

Monday’s lawsuit is one of several targeting Kennedy’s handling of public health policy since being appointed to his post by President Donald Trump in February.

Last week, the city of Baltimore sued Kennedy for a new department rule that it claims would force nearly 2 million Americans off health insurance. In May, a coalition of 19 states sued the secretary for “sabotaging” his department with calls to gut its manpower and slash internal agencies.

And later in May, a Trump-appointed federal judge lambasted the government in another case targeting Kennedy — this time for pulling $11 billion in public health funding approved by Congress during the Covid-19 pandemic. Responding to that lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy ruled that Kennedy does “not have unfettered power to further a president’s agenda,” and ordered that funding be restored.

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