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Judge Blocks RFK Jr. From Implementing 'Arbitrary and Capricious' Vaccine Overhaul
One physician and public health expert called the ruling "a much-needed victory for a sane approach to federal vaccine policy that relies on science, not misinformation and conspiracy theories."
Mar 16, 2026
In what advocates called a major victory for public health, a federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from implementing a series of moves that critics have warned would weaken childhood immunization efforts and increase the likelihood of serious disease outbreaks.
US District Judge Brian E. Murphy of Massachusetts, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, invalidated Kennedy's reorganized Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) panel, which was set to meet later this week.
Kennedy—who was confirmed by the Senate last year over the objections of tens of thousands experts and despite being a purveyor of vaccine misinformation—replaced ACIP members with several people with ties to the anti-vaccine movement.
Murphy also blocked the committee's unprecedented changes to US immunization recommendations, writing that the "arbitrary and capricious" move stands in stark contrast with the long established decision-making process he called "a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements."
“Unfortunately, the government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions," the judge said.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Kennedy revised the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) childhood immunization schedule so that fewer vaccines are now universally recommended for all children. The agency also reclassified vaccines that were previously endorsed for all children into categories in which vaccination depends on designated risk groups and consultations with medical professionals, among other changes.
Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have announced that they would not follow the new CDC immunization recommendations.
Lookie Here! As of now, 29 states + DC, have announced that they are no longer going to follow CDC's recommendations for some or all childhood vaccines.Kennedy is not restoring public trust in science as he said he would. 🧪 www.kff.org/other-health...
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— Princess Vimentin PhD | Cancer Biologist (@princess-vimentin.bsky.social) March 12, 2026 at 11:47 AM
Plaintiffs' attorney Richard Huges IV said in a statement that "this ruling is a momentous step toward restoring science-based vaccine policymaking."
"The judge recognized that the actions of Secretary Kennedy and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are not grounded in science and that they are destructive," he added. "We are thrilled that the court has discarded the baseless vaccine schedule changes made by Secretary Kennedy and is blocking the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from doing further damage to vaccine policy."
Dr. Robert Steinbrook, Health Research Group director at Public Citizen, said in response to the ruling that "Judge Murphy’s decision is a much-needed victory for a sane approach to federal vaccine policy that relies on science, not misinformation and conspiracy theories."
"Kennedy’s hand-picked ACIP has been a national embarrassment, thoroughly lacking in the ability to make careful fact-based decisions," he added. "The judge’s ruling offers a responsible path forward for public health and evidence-based federal vaccine policy.”
RFK Jr. fired all of the legitimate scientific experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with unqualified political appointees.A judge just ruled that the new members were not appropriately appointed, so ACIP cannot meet this week to spread more misinformation.
— Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD (@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social) March 16, 2026 at 1:38 PM
Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Families USA, said in a statement: "When politics override science, our children pay the price. Today’s decision helps ensure that medical evidence—not ideology—guides how we protect kids from preventable diseases."
Wright continued:
Secretary Kennedy’s attempt to remove universal recommendations for routine vaccinations only increased confusion among medical providers and families. The routine vaccines being questioned by HHS are the product of centuries of rigorous science and medicine and are why children today don’t die from measles or suffer the lifelong consequences of diseases we long ago learned to prevent. For a country as large, diverse, and mobile as ours, universal vaccine recommendations are the safest and most effective way to stop outbreaks before they start.
Amid several recent outbreaks, public health officials warned late last year that the United States is close to following Canada in losing its measles elimination status, a deadly and preventable setback many experts attribute to HHS' vaccine-averse policies and practices under Kennedy.
"We commend the court for this ruling, but families should not have to depend on litigation to ensure their child can receive a routine vaccine," Wright said. "Evidence-based medicine keeps children alive and in school. Preventing disease should be the foundation of any healthcare system serious about confronting the next disease outbreak or finding the next cure."
The group Protect Our Care called the decision "a major step in the right direction for children’s health after many setbacks under this administration."
“Most Americans, most states, and now a federal court have rejected the [President Donald] Trump-RFK Jr. scheme to make preventable disease great again among American children while exploding health costs across the country," Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse said. "While this ruling is a reprieve from harmful anti-vaccine policy based on nothing but junk science and discredited conspiracies, it’s clear the Trump administration is determined to resuscitate their agenda in a higher court because they care more about their anti-science agenda than keeping kids healthy.”
Indeed, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said the agency "looks forward to this judge’s decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing.”
Public health advocates noted the limitations of judicial rulings.
"The courts can only do so much without Congress, which must fulfill its oversight responsibility and rein in an executive branch that is taking an axe to core public health protections," Wright said. "Transparency and scientific integrity are not optional, especially when children’s lives are at stake. Families deserve vaccine policy grounded in evidence and expert guidance—not ideology or personal bias—with the goal of making sure every child in America can grow up healthy.”
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'Absurd Yet Predictable': US Close to Losing Measles Elimination Status Under RFK Jr.
"The CDC is now completely compromised after Trump and RFK Jr. ousted or drove out real, well-intentioned, and intelligent scientists," said one physician.
Nov 21, 2025
US public health officials warned this week that the country is close to following Canada in losing its measles elimination status, a deadly and preventable setback many experts attribute to the vaccine-averse policies and practices of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials have linked the ongoing measles outbreak in Arizona and Utah with the major outbreak in Texas that began in January, both of which are being caused by the same viral subtype. With no signs of slowing, and holiday travel and gatherings fast approaching, experts worry that measles transmission could escalate and the disease will no longer be considered eliminated.
Under World Health Organization guidance, "eliminated" means an absence of endemic virus transmission for 12 months or longer in a defined geographical area under a well-performing surveillance system.
Many public health experts blame the administration of President Donald Trump—and particularly Kennedy's policies—for the measles resurgence. Kennedy, who initially downplayed the seriousness of the Texas outbreak, has endorsed vaccines, but has also made unsupported or misleading claims about the safety and efficacy of measles shots.
"Absurd yet predictable," Dr. Michael O'Brien, an urgent care pediatrician, wrote Thursday on X. "The CDC is now completely compromised after Trump and RFK Jr. ousted or drove out real, well-intentioned, and intelligent scientists. As measles approaches endemic status in the US for the first time since 2000, the CDC has abandoned science and reason."
The anti-vaccination movement is largely to blame for the continuing measles outbreak and the fact that the U.S. is going to lose our measles elimination status. Until RFK Jr. is removed from office, things are only going to get worse. @jimalwine.bsky.social and I wrote about here:
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— Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD (@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social) November 19, 2025 at 2:18 PM
The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. However, with 1,753 confirmed cases and three deaths in 45 reported outbreaks so far this year, experts say the US is at risk of following Canada, which announced earlier this month that it has lost its elimination status, which it enjoyed since 1998.
As in the US, experts attribute Canada's measles backsliding to declining vaccination rates, mis- and disinformation, and vaccine aversion—especially among religious groups. The West Texas outbreak began in the close-knit, unvaccinated Mennonite community in Gaines County, while the Arizona/Utah outbreak originated among members of a fundamentalist Mormon offshoot.
More than 9 in 10 reported US measles cases this year are among people who have either not been vaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown.
"We are in this dire situation primarily due to the explosion of the anti-vaccine movement since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic."
Writing for LiveScience, University of Pennsylvania molecular virologist James Alwine and University of Arizona professor emerita and epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs warned Wednesday that measles is "a bellwether of declining vaccination rates—a wailing siren that other vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks are just around the corner."
"We are in this dire situation primarily due to the explosion of the anti-vaccine movement since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic," Alwine and Jacobs asserted. "The movement is responsible for undermining trust in scientists and vaccines via a tsunami of misinformation coming from social media accounts and podcast appearances."
The authors continued:
This was made worse when Senate Republicans confirmed Kennedy as secretary of HHS, despite the objections of tens of thousands of scientists, healthcare providers, and public health practitioners. Kennedy is an avowed anti-vaccination proponent who chaired Children's Health Defense, an organization that regularly promotes vaccine misinformation. He is also a conspiracy theorist and has claimed that Covid-19 is a "bioweapon" engineered to "attack Caucasians and Black people" while sparing Ashkenazi Jews; that WiFi causes brain cancer; and that drug use, not HIV, causes AIDS. His appointment opened the door to install anti-vaccine proponents as leaders in public health, such as replacing the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with several individuals with links to the anti-vaccine movement. In confirming Kennedy, Senate Republicans utterly failed the people of the US and demonstrated a cavalier disregard for decades of scientific achievement.
In June, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) launched an investigation into Kennedy's ACIP purge. The following month, six major US medical organizations sued Kennedy, alleging his vaccine policies are placing children at grave and immediate risk.
"As the anti-vaccine movement continues to be nurtured by Kennedy and his followers, this threat will only continue to expand and grow more severe," Alwine and Jacobs warned. "Removing state vaccine requirements for school entry—as has happened in Florida—is demonstrative of this, and represents an unacceptable risk."
"Kennedy must be removed from office," they added, echoing a September demand by more than 1,000 current and former HHS officials. "There can be no improvements in public health or vaccination rates as long as he continues his destructive reign."
In September, Congresswoman Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) filed articles of impeachment against Kennedy, declaring that he "has violated his oath of office and proven himself unfit to serve the American people."
Advocacy groups and medical organizations have gathered more than 150,000 petition signatures calling for Kennedy's removal.
On Friday, Congresswoman Kim Schrier (D-Wash.), who chairs the Democratic Doctors Caucus, led 65 colleagues demanding that Kennedy "immediately correct" the CDC website "after it was updated to promote the widely disproven and dangerous claim that vaccines may cause autism."
"RFK Jr.’s decision to spread fringe conspiracy theories and misinformation on the CDC’s official website is reckless," Schrier said in a statement. "He’s scaring parents, undermining trust in the CDC, and putting children at risk.”
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Deadly Obsession
The harm Trump's health secretary is doing when it comes to disease prevention could end being nearly impossible to calculate.
Sep 02, 2025
Vaccines have saved millions of lives. But for decades, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pursued a single-minded crusade against them. Numerous scientific studies have debunked his false claim that vaccines cause autism. But now he’s weaponizing the nation’s public health system to promote his ideological quackery.
Once a Crackpot, Always a Crackpot – But Now Possessing the Power of Life and Death
In a 2021 podcast, Kennedy urged Americans to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
In 2021, Kennedy said, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated.”
In a video promoting his non-profit organization’s anti-vaccine sticker campaign, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to a sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”
In a July 2023 podcast, he said, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, knows that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine claims are bogus. But Kennedy assured him that he would protect “the public health benefit of vaccinations” and maintain without changes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). That committee of outside experts reviews the most recent data on all vaccines to assess safety, efficacy, and clinical need. It develops a recommended guidance schedule for all vaccines, including seasonal flu shots and COVID boosters. Physicians rely on that guidance in counseling patients, and insurance companies and government programs use it to determine the vaccines they will cover.
Based on Kennedy’s promises, Sen. Cassidy cast the deciding vote to confirm him as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Timeline of Destruction
In RFK Jr.’s mission to spread his lies, he has systematically gutted the world’s premier public health organization.
In March, Kennedy announced that he would conduct a study to find the cause of autism by September – an absurd mission with a nonsensical end date.
Leading his autism “study” is David Geier, a discredited vaccine skeptic who isn’t a physician. In 2012, the Maryland State Board of Physicians pursued charges against Geier, alleging that he had engaged in the unlicensed practice of medicine while working on autistic kids with his father, who was a physician at the time. His father’s medical license was suspended following claims that he had “endangered autistic children and exploited their parents by administering a treatment protocol that has a known substantial risk of serious harm and which is neither consistent with evidence-based medicine nor generally accepted in the relevant scientific community.”
- In May, Kennedy announced new rules that delay vaccine approvals and impose severe limits on the availability of Covid vaccines.
- On May 28, Moderna announced that Kennedy had terminated a $590 million award for late-stage development of a bird-flu vaccine and other pre-pandemic vaccine candidates.
- On June 9, Kennedy fired the entire CDC’S ACIP committee – all 17 of them.
- On June 11, Kennedy named eight replacements to ACIP. Among them were anti-vaccine activists, conspiracy theorists, vaccine misinformation promoters, and a co-author of and a signatory to the pandemic-era Great Barrington Declaration that recommended widespread exposure to COVID as the strategy for dealing with the outbreak (instead of widespread vaccination).
- On August 5, Kennedy cut $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine research. That research had produced Trump’s Operation Warp Speed Covid vaccine that saved more than three million American lives and is the best hope for fighting the next pandemic.
Paging Sen. Cassidy
On August 25, Kennedy demanded that newly-confirmed CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez fire career CDC officials and commit to backing his advisory committee if it recommended restricting access to proven vaccines. She refused.
That evening, Dr. Monarez called Sen. Cassidy, who then called Kennedy. The next day, an angry Kennedy reiterated his ultimatum to Dr. Monarez. Again, she refused. The next day, she received a call from the White House personnel office telling her that she was fired.
Four of the highest-ranking CDC officials resigned in protest: Dr. Debra Houry (deputy director and chief medical officer), Dr. Demetre Daskalakis (director of the National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases), Dr. Daniel Jernigan (director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases), and Dr. Jennifer Layden, (director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology).
In his resignation letter, Dr. Daskalakis warned that the current environment “treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health.” He wrote that the administration’s “desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.” In an email to colleagues, he denounced “the ongoing weaponization of public health.”
On August 27, Trump presided over a televised, three-hour North Korea-style cabinet meeting. He asked Kennedy about autism, and RFK Jr. responded, “We are doing very well. We will have announcements as promised in September. We’re finding interventions, certain interventions are clearly, almost certainly causing autism. And we’re going to be able to address those in September.”
Trump then rambled for several minutes, revealing that he had no understanding of the complexity behind the increase in autism diagnoses and concluding, “I think we maybe know the reason and I look forward to being with you in that press conference.”
Kennedy was offering Trump a simple and incorrect solution to a complex problem.
But Sen. Cassidy knows that the answer to the autism puzzle isn’t simple – and it isn’t vaccines. On August 28, he called for a delay in the CDC’s upcoming vaccine advisory committee meeting. He said that if the meeting proceeds, “any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy” given concerns about the panel “and the current turmoil in CDC leadership.”
The same day, Kennedy named Jim O’Neill as acting director of the CDC. O’Neill, a former Silicon Valley biotech executive, is not a physician or a scientist.
The Reckoning Ahead
Until it affects them personally, most Americans don’t—or won’t—the magnitude of ruinous government action. The long run is always somebody else’s problem. Along with the public’s short attention span, Trump relies on that principle to govern.
So have Senate Republicans. Abdicating their constitutional responsibilities to reject Trump’s unfit nominees for critical government posts, they have put incompetent ideologues like RFK Jr. in charge of life-and-death decisions.
But eventually, the long-run arrives. And when it does, millions of Americans will pay the ultimate price.
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