Judge Rules Parents Have Less Say In Pediatric Vaccine Schedule

A powerful medical organization and its backers won a legal victory last week in an ongoing struggle against federal efforts to alter vaccine recommendations and return decision-making to parents.

On March 16 U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy issued a ruling that effectively halted the government’s lead vaccine recommendation group from meeting and stayed vaccine recommendations published under U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and other left-wing medical groups sued Kennedy in July in response to his removal of pregnant women and healthy children from the Covid-19 vaccine recommended list. The group then amended its suit, filing multiple complaints challenging  Kennedy’s reconstituted immunization advisory panel and its votes. The AAP also challenged the revised pediatric schedule that the CDC published in January, which aligned the U.S. schedule with most developed nations by removing six vaccinations from the current schedule.

The American Academy of Pediatrics requested a ban on Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meetings; Murphy acquiesced in part, granting a stay on the ACIP appointment rather than an injunction, the same day the Supreme Court stayed another of his decisions. The March meeting of ACIP, at which the committee was poised to address Covid-19 vaccine injuries and recommendation processes, is now indefinitely postponed.

“The same day he is stayed for repeatedly refusing to follow the law, he issues another activist decision,” wrote Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on X. “We will keep appealing these lawless decisions, and we will keep winning.”

In his 45-page ruling, Murphy wrote that the government has “undermined the integrity of its actions” by sidestepping ACIP in the vaccine schedule revision process and replacing members without the use of “rigorous screening.” The newly appointed members, Murphy wrote, represent a “procedural failure … that … fails to comport with governing law.” Violation of the Administrative Procedure Act will likely be proven, he concluded.

Responding to Murphy’s decision, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said that the department “looks forward to this judge’s decision being overturned” in a statement to The Defender.

The Battle over ACIP

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ decisions have historically dictated the pediatric vaccine schedule, which is then deployed in pediatric offices across the country, shaping mandates in states and within public institutions. Federal law requires the Vaccines for Children program to adhere to ACIP’s recommendations, and large payouts are associated with the panel’s decisions.

But Kennedy has distanced the process from governmental pressure by deferring decision-making to parents and their physicians and altering recommendations, not barring access. When the ACIP made modest adjustments to the vaccine schedule, HHS committed to maintaining health care coverage for the 2025 schedule for children enrolled in federal health programs, offering continued access to the vaccine schedule previously in place.

An investigation of the vaccine schedule following a December executive order found that the U.S. demands far more injections than other industrialized countries, including several vaccines that had never undergone large-scale, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trials before use in the population.

This is in large part due to the passage of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which granted vaccine makers broad liability shields from injury and death from their products.

HHS only recently reinstated a task force created to review vaccine safety after it was disbanded nearly two decades ago. The disbandment left parents with a stark absence of vaccine safety data, but multiple efforts to roll back decades of vaccine makers’ health care market dominance are underway. The reinstatement of the Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, congressional efforts to repeal the 1986 Act, and a RICO lawsuit claiming a “decades-long racketeering scheme” between the AAP and vaccine manufacturers are applying significant pressure to the status quo.

Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker, the Ascension Press blog, and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer, and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. She and her brilliant engineer/scientist husband homeschool their six children.