By Marie Rosenthal, MS
The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and others joined the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and a pregnant physician, which filed a lawsuit July 7, against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and HHS in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Everyone should have access to lifesaving vaccines, according to Tina Tan, MD, the president of IDSA, in a statement released after the lawsuit was filed. “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. As a community of clinicians, public health officials, and scientists, our focus remains the protection of patients and public health,” said Dr. Tan, who is a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; the medical director of the International Patient Services Program; a co-director of the Pediatric Travel Medicine Clinic; and the director of the International Adoptee Clinic at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. She is also an attending pediatrician and infectious disease specialist.
In the lawsuit, American Academy of Pediatrics v. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the associations and a pregnant physician named in the complaint as Jane Doe alleged the HHS and Mr. Kennedy acted arbitrarily and capriciously when they unilaterally changed COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant people.
In addition, they alleged he unjustly dismissed 17 of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—citing old reports about alleged ethics violations that were made before any of the panel members had been appointed to the committee—and appointed replacements who have “historically espoused anti-vaccine viewpoints.” The plaintiffs fear this panel will increase vaccine hesitancy and decrease the receipt of vaccinations in the United States. These actions are a threat to public health, according to the complaint.
A presentation made at the ACIP meeting held in June, showed an estimated up to 50,000 Americans died from COVID-19 between October 2024 and June 2025—and most were unvaccinated.
More than 270,000 healthcare and public health officials are represented by the plaintiffs. In addition to the AAP and IDSA, the American College of Physicians, American Public Health Association, Massachusetts Public Health Alliance and Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine joined the lawsuit.
The lawsuit asks for preliminary and permanent injunctions to enjoin Mr. Kennedy’s rescissions of COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and a declaratory judgment pronouncing the change in recommendations as unlawful.
“This administration is an existential threat to vaccination in America, and those in charge are only just getting started. 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,” said Richard H. Hughes IV, a partner at Epstein Becker Green and lead counsel for the plaintiffs. “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.”
The lawsuit alleges that a coordinated set of actions by HHS and Mr. Kennedy were designed to mislead, confuse and gradually desensitize the public to anti-vaccine and anti-science rhetoric, and that he has routinely flouted federal procedural rules. These actions include blocking CDC communications, unexplained cancellations of vaccine panel meetings at the FDA and CDC, announcing studies to investigate nonexistent links between vaccines and autism—which have already been disproved—unilaterally overriding immunization recommendations, and replacing the diverse members of ACIP with a slate of individuals biased against sound vaccine facts.
The complaint cites several actions made by Mr. Kennedy, including his May 27 announcement on the social media site X 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.” The complaint alleged the policy decision was “baseless” and “uniformed” and will put pregnant women and their unborn children at risk.
According to a presentation made at the June 2025 ACIP meeting, pregnancy increases the risk for COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases, and having COVID-19 during pregnancy increases the risk for complications, including preterm birth and spontaneous abortions. But vaccination can mitigate those risks as well as provide protection for newborns who are too young to receive vaccination, which is not available until a child is 6 months old. And nearly 1 in 10 people who develop COVID-19 during pregnancy will have long COVID, according to a study. (Obstet Gynecol 2024;144[3]:411-420).
“This decision immediately exposes these vulnerable populations to a serious illness with potentially irreversible long-term effects and, in some cases, death. This is not a hypothetical concern, but a pressing public health emergency that demands immediate legal action and correction,” the plaintiffs said.
The anonymous individual plaintiff in the lawsuit is a pregnant physician who fears she will be blocked from getting the COVID-19 vaccine booster since the secretarial directive, despite her high risk for exposure to infectious diseases due to her practicing in a hospital.
She is not the only one, according to a physician who is not associated with the lawsuit. John B. Lynch, MD, the associate medical director at Harborview Medical Center, in Seattle, spoke at a briefing after the COVID-19 changes were made about trials of another pregnant healthcare worker who could not get vaccinated even though her job and pregnancy put her at risk.
“The American Academy of Pediatrics is alarmed by recent decisions by HHS to alter the routine childhood immunization schedule. 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. Our immunization system has long been a cornerstone of U.S. public health, but actions by the current administration are jeopardizing its success. As we pursue action to restore science to U.S. vaccination policy, AAP will continue to provide the science-based, trusted recommendations that every American deserves,” said Susan J. Kressly, MD, the president of the AAP, in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
By post time, neither Mr. Kennedy nor HHS responded to a request for comment. We will update the story if he does issue a response.
