OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
4:07 PM – Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Several medical organizations have filed a lawsuit against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, claiming that recent actions committed by the secretary and the agency constitute a “public health emergency requiring urgent legal intervention and remediation.”
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
The legal challenge comes in response to the new vaccine measures enacted by Secretary Kennedy, including the dismissal of the previous vaccine advisory panel and the withdrawal of official recommendations endorsing mRNA COVID-19 vaccinations for children and pregnant women.
“He’s doing everything he possibly can to undermine vaccine confidence,” stated Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, one organization joining the lawsuit. “Quite frankly, we’ve had enough.”
Richard Hughes, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, admitted that it was Kennedy’s late-May post on X—where he rejected the CDC’s vaccine recommendation that children and pregnant women receive the COVID-19 shot and boosters—as the “final straw” prompting legal action.
The suing parties are now “asking the court to order the secretary to announce on X that those immunization recommendations are now reinstated to the CDC immunization schedules,” Hughes noted in a briefing on Monday.
American Academy of Pediatrics President Dr. Susan Kressly chimed in to argue that “our immunization system has long been a cornerstone of U.S. public health, but actions by the current administration are jeopardizing its success.”
During the briefing, Dr. Tina Tan, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), another plaintiff in the lawsuit, also asserted that “the only acceptable number of dead children from COVID is zero.”
Others participating in the suit include the American College of Physicians, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance.
An unnamed pregnant woman, who was presumably introduced to the joint legal matter by a doctor involved in the suit, is named as a plaintiff as well. According to NBC News, she had expressed concern that recent changes to the vaccination schedule could “prevent her” from receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, despite the numerous times RFK Jr. has stated that those vaccines are here to stay, even if they will no longer be on the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule.
The schedule includes routine vaccines for Hepatitis B, DTaP, Hib, PCV, IPV, MMR, Varicella, Hepatitis A, HPV, meningococcal, and annual influenza.
The CDC also claims that pregnant women are at a “higher risk for more severe complications” from COVID-19 than non-pregnant women.
According to American College of Physicians President Dr. Jason Goldman, those who visit his practice are becoming much more hesitant to take vaccines in general.
“They [Americans] are not trusting the system anymore, and this is a direct impact on the health of our patients, because if they don’t get vaccinated, they can get sicker, they can end up hospitalized or even die,” Goldman claimed during the briefing.
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