Public health groups sue over CDC vaccine recommendations

A coalition of medical groups have expanded an ongoing lawsuit against Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to now challenge and reverse the reductions made to the childhood vaccine schedule.

A group of plaintiffs including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the American Public Health Association (APHA) and others sued HHS under Kennedy in July 2025 to undo updated COVID-19 vaccine guidance that no longer included pregnant women and healthy children in the recommended demographics.

In its fourth amended complaint, the lawsuit now additionally challenges the decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this month to reduce the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11, bringing the country in line with that of Denmark, a nation Kennedy frequently points to when expounding on vaccine guidance.

The plaintiffs called this decision the “most egregious, reckless, and dangerous of the actions Defendants have taken to date” in their amended complaint filed on Monday. They further called for an upcoming meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to be blocked from being held.

Kennedy fired the entire ACIP last year and remade it with many appointees sympathetic to his views, including many known vaccine critics and skeptics.

The plaintiffs argued the current membership of the committee violates federal law that requires committees to be “fairly balanced” and not be “inappropriately influenced.”

The plaintiffs had signaled its intention to sue over the reduction in childhood vaccines soon after the decision was announced.

“Court intervention is now essential to prevent further harm, protect evidence-based recommendations, and ensure that critical decisions affecting children’s health are made transparently and guided by evidence, not ideology,” Richard Hughes IV, attorney for the plaintiffs said in a statement. 

“We are confident that we will demonstrate for the court that this administration has acted arbitrarily and capriciously in revisions to the childhood immunization schedule and, furthermore, that the current ACIP will continue this destructive pattern if allowed to continue meeting,” added Hughes.

An HHS spokesperson called the lawsuit “a baseless attempt to litigate for the interests of the organization’s top corporate donors, which make virtually every vaccine across the CDC immunization schedules.”

“AAP is angry that CDC eliminated corporate influence in vaccine recommendations by reconstituting the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with leading physicians and public health experts and by accepting recommendations from a comprehensive scientific review of U.S. childhood immunization practices conducted under President Trump’s order to examine international best practices in peer developed countries,” they added.