The American Academy of Pediatrics is suing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a bid to overturn his department’s newly reduced childhood vaccine schedule.
The change has wreaked havoc on pediatric care nationwide, with doctors operating in “crisis-response mode” ever since Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services suddenly announced on Jan. 5 that it was no longer recommending that all children receive six out of 17 previously recommended vaccines, according to an amended complaint filed Monday.
In a move the suit called “reckless” and “dangerous,” the agency now only recommends vaccines for some dangerous diseases—including rotavirus, hepatitis A, and meningococcal disease—for high-risk children, or if a doctor recommends them.
That has made it more difficult for parents to get the vaccines and has burdened pediatric doctors and hospitals, according to the complaint, which was filed Monday in federal court in Massachusetts.
“Defendants arbitrarily—and illegally—revised the existing childhood and adolescent immunization schedule through a ‘Decision Memorandum’… without following the evidentiary-driven, and legally required processes for issuing recommended vaccine schedules in the United States,” wrote the AAP, which was joined in its lawsuit by six other public health groups.
The suit also seeks to disband Kennedy’s hand-picked vaccine advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy stacked with his fellow anti-vaccine crusaders.
The Daily Beast has reached out to HHS for comment.
The revised vaccine schedule blindsided experts with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and left the AAP scrambling to revise its entire clinical guidance, which is based on the assumption that children are routinely vaccinated, according to the complaint.
Doctors are now forced to spend hours visiting individually with families who still want the full vaccine schedule, while hospitals are facing the prospect of more uninsured patients showing up sick in the emergency room because they couldn’t see a doctor and get vaccinated, the AAP alleged.
Since the new recommendations were released, some parents who were previously on the fence about vaccinating their kids have decided not to immunize them at all, and doctors have been left trying to de-escalate “increasingly confrontational” visits, according to the suit.
According to the lawsuit, HHS adopted its new vaccine schedule without considering basic questions as how the changes would impact patients’ health; whether uninsured Americans could still get the shots if they wanted them; and how the changes would burden doctors and hospitals.
Instead, the HHS said it was amending the U.S.’s childhood vaccine schedule to align with Denmark, which it described as a “peer” country.
But Denmark has universal healthcare and near-universal prenatal screening, better disease screening, paid parental leave, and centralized medical records from birth to death.
Even Danish health officials found the HHS’s decision baffling given the disparities in the two countries’ populations, health care systems, and prevalence of infectious disease, the suit alleges.
The HHS nevertheless concluded the U.S. was a “global outlier among peer nations in the number of target diseases included in its childhood vaccination schedule.”
Denmark, however, is the real outlier, with fewer vaccines than Canada, Australia, and much of Western Europe, which have schedules similar to the U.S.’s previous guidelines, according to the AAP’s complaint.
The suit argues that the decision violated the Administrative Procedure Act’s prohibition against “arbitrary” and “capricious” agency actions.
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