The Supreme Court has declined to hear a lawsuit brought by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine group that claimed Meta had illegally censored the organization’s social media posts.
Children’s Health Defense—which President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services chaired from 2015 to 2023—had argued that Meta’s Facebook colluded with the federal government starting in 2019 to restrict access to its anti-vaccine posts, NBC News reported.
Facebook removed the group’s page entirely in 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic. For years, the organization has been one of the nation’s leading purveyors of debunked conspiracy theories claiming vaccines cause autism and neurological defects.
The organization argued that the social media restrictions violated its First and Fifth Amendment rights. Lower courts, however, found that there was no evidence Meta had coordinated with the government.
As a private actor, Meta was free to decide what content to platform, the federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled. Without the Supreme Court’s intervention, the federal appellate ruling stands.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Children’s Health Defense for comment.
Kennedy left the organization in 2023 to run for president. In July 2024, he dropped his third-party presidential bid and endorsed Trump in exchange for a place in Trump’s cabinet.
During his Senate confirmation hearings, he insisted he wasn’t anti-vaccine and promised he would work within the existing vaccine-approval and safety-monitoring systems—including maintaining the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, an independent panel that recommends which vaccines to approve.
Since taking over the Department of Health and Human Services, however, Kennedy has pushed out the nation’s leading vaccine experts, installed anti-vaccine allies at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spread newer and crazier anti-vax conspiracy theories, and abruptly fired all 17 members of the ACIP.
Despite promising not to repopulate ACIP with “ideological anti-vaxxers,” at least two of the eight new members are overtly anti-vaccine.
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