By Lilo H. Stainton
Republished with permission
New Jersey Monitor
New Jersey joined a group of 15 states pushing to reverse “radical and unlawful” vaccine policy decisions made by the Trump administration that state leaders and most health professionals say endanger children’s lives and public health in general.
The lawsuit says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the administration’s health and human services secretary, undermined public health by appointing vaccine skeptics to a key federal advisory panel and overseeing an effort to strip seven childhood vaccines of their universally recommended status, a move the states say “will make children sicker and strain state resources.”
Attorney General Jen Davenport in a statement said Kennedy’s push to overhaul the nation’s childhood vaccine schedule “rests on fringe theories and ignores decades of science.”
“Protecting children is a priority for our office. Compare that to the Trump Administration and Secretary Kennedy, whose reckless approach to public health policy gambles with children’s lives and puts our communities in danger. RFK, Jr. replaced established experts with an unqualified vaccine panel and issued a rogue vaccine schedule that gambles with children’s health and lives,” Davenport said.
Jay Bhattacharya, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is also named as a defendant.
The lawsuit is one of 49 New Jersey has filed challenging the Trump administration during the president’s second term, three of which have been filed since Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) took office on Jan. 20. It also comes after New Jersey has already taken steps to sever its policies from federal guidance that public health leaders call questionable.
In September, the state joined the Northeast Regional Public Health Collaborative, an informal group of more than ten states and cities, to share scientific expertise and public health resources in the wake of massive changes at the CDC, which has long served as a resource on local public health issues.
Tuesday’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, calls on the court to declare unlawful Kennedy’s appointments of 17 vaccine-skeptics to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, after he fired all existing voting members in June. It also seeks to overturn vaccine recommendations Kennedy’s team issued in early January, based on guidance from the reconstituted panel, which called for seven vaccines — including shots that protect against hepatitis, meningitis, and COVID-19 — to be available for healthy children only after they consult with a physician.
A memo codifying the change said the new guidance is “not a significant departure from the current recommended immunization construct,” although all seven shots were previously recommended for all healthy youth. The recommendations impact the availability and distribution of the shots, as well as insurance coverage.
Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the federal Health and Human Services Department, dismissed the lawsuit in a statement to the New Jersey Monitor.
“This is a publicity stunt dressed up as a lawsuit. By law, the health secretary has clear authority to make determinations on the CDC immunization schedule and the composition of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The CDC immunization schedule reforms reflect common-sense public health policy shared by peer, developed countries,” Hilliard said in an email.
The legal filing pushed back on this notion that “peer, developed” countries have adopted this same strategy, noting that the Trump administration’s memo calls for a comparison to Denmark.
“But Denmark is not a ‘peer country’ in relation to vaccines because, among other things, unlike the U.S., it has a small, homogenous population and universal healthcare. And Denmark’s vaccine policies are a global outlier that cannot be retrofitted to the U.S. Even Danish health officials are baffled by Defendants’ reliance on Denmark,” it reads.
Public health experts said the change in the vaccine recommendations will lead to confusion and reduce the number of children who are immunized, resulting in more sickness and death. Davenport on Tuesday noted the hepatitis vaccine is considered 90% effective when administered properly, a track record backed by decades of research.
A study published by the CDC in 2024 found routine childhood immunizations prevented more than 500 million illnesses, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1.1 million deaths among children born between 1994 and 2023 in America, saving some $540 billion in health care costs. Annually, vaccinations prevent some 4 million deaths worldwide, according to the CDC’s own website.
“The evidence that vaccines save lives and reduce illness is overwhelming,” Davenport’s office said Tuesday.
The lawsuit says the memo outlining the revised recommendations was not based on any scientific evidence or a systematic review of data, and the immunization advisory committee that provided input was not “lawfully constituted.” The change also ignores “overwhelming evidence” supporting the effectiveness of vaccines, it notes.
New Jersey is joined by attorneys general in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, and the governor of Pennsylvania.
