A federal judge in Massachusetts on March 16, 2025, has stayed all votes and future meetings of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in the past year, including new vaccine recommendations, due to “an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee.”
The “stay” by Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, is connected to a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) on July 7, 2025, against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for changing recommendations for COVID-19 shots.
AAP later amended the suit to challenge Kennedy’s appointments on the ACIP. In arguing his stay, Murphy wrote the plaintiffs are “likely to suffer irreparable harm should ACIP continue to operate with an unbalanced committee.”
Murphy has challenged the Trump administration on unrelated policies. Higher courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have reversed those decisions. The latest reversal came the same day Murphy released the ACIP decision. On March 16, 2026, a federal appeals court lifted Murphy’s order blocking rapid deportation to countries other than the country of origin.
Murphy’s opinion for the “stay” in the ACIP case is 45 pages.
Evaluating the ‘Experts’
On May 27, 2025, Kennedy ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change the COVID shot recommendation for healthy children and pregnant women to “shared clinical decision-making.”
On June 9, 2025, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the ACIP and appointed his own panel over the next several months.
Murphy questioned the vaccine credentials of all but six of the now 15-member committee. Three of those members, Retsef Levi, Robert Malone, and Catherine Stein, wrote Murphy, “though they have some experience arguably relevant to ACIP’s function, appear to lack the qualifications and experience to constitute expertise in vaccines and immunization (judge’s italics).” In his criticism of Malone, Murphy cited a New York Times op-ed.
In January 2026, HHS introduced a new immunization schedule of childhood vaccines recommending six of the 17 on the list to high-risk groups only, in line with other developed countries.
Murphy’s lengthy opinion leaves more questions than answers, writes Jeff Childers, an attorney who has litigated vaccine-related cases.
“Murphy’s test for ‘vaccine expertise’ —a test he never explicitly defined— could be boiled down to one question: Did they spend their entire career inside the vaccine establishment? If not: unqualified,” wrote Childers on the Coffee and COVID substack. “The old ACIP’s Judge-Murphy-Approved ‘expertise’ didn’t protect the public. It protected the program. It protected the gravy train. It protected the bureaucracy.”
Double Standard
In 1993, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) was among several plaintiffs who sued the Clinton administration over the creation of the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform.
Like the AAP, the plaintiffs sought a restraining order and a preliminary injunction that would bar the task force from meeting until it complied with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, requiring such meetings to be open.
“I think it is remarkable that a federal judge is interfering with committee appointments and trying to undo the committee’s determinations,” said Jane Orient, M.D., the executive director of AAPS. “Nothing so aggressive happened in the AAPS FACA-based lawsuit against the Clinton Health Care Task Force, which intended to fundamentally change the medical system.”
Kennedy needs to make changes, says Orient. “The former ACIP committee rubber-stamped virtually all vaccine requests and was riddled with conflicts of interest. FACA ought to be applied to that.”
Equally troubling is the judge’s stay, says Orient. “The seemingly unrestrained power of a heavily politicized judiciary to rule the country and impose special-interest-designed mandates is alarming.”
There is a double standard, says Jeffrey Singer, M.D., a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
“I’m disappointed in the decision,” said Singer. “The plaintiffs seem to object to federal overreach only when they disagree with it, and asking courts to reimpose a one-size-fits-all national policy they prefer reflects a reluctance to embrace pluralism, decentralization, and local control.”
Local Decision Making
The legal challenges to Kennedy’s policies lead to a bigger question: what role should the government play in the private health care decisions of citizens? The AAP lawsuit is centered on the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule and whether it is advisory or coercive.
The AAP represents thousands of pediatricians who make vaccine recommendations to parents. On January 21, 2026, “the advocacy organization, Children’s Health Defense (CHD), and additional plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), alleging a “decades-long racketeering scheme” to conceal vaccine risks,” reported Health Care News.
Does this make a strong case for more centralized policies on vaccines?
“It is true that large national organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics exert significant influence on parents and policy makers,” said Singer.
“But that’s different in kind from government coercion,” said Singer. “These are private actors participating in an ongoing medical and scientific debate. In medicine, there’s rarely a single right answer. The solution to a dominant voice isn’t federal control—it’s more pluralism: competing perspectives, open discussion of benefits and risks, and room for clinicians and patients to exercise judgment based on individual circumstances and local conditions.”
Vaccine Mandates
Several states have considered banning vaccine mandates to protect informed consent. Expanding that to a federal ban would be a mistake, says Singer.
“A federal ban on vaccine mandates would contradict the same federalist principles that argue against nationalizing vaccination policy in the first place,” said Singer.
“These decisions are better handled at the state and local level, where communities can weigh risks, benefits, and values in light of local conditions,” said Singer. “I generally oppose vaccine mandates, but replacing decentralized decision-making with a single national rule—whether to impose mandates or prohibit them—creates the same problem in a different form. Public health works best when decisions remain close to the people they affect.”
AnneMarie Schieber ([email protected]) is the managing editor of Health Care News.
AnneMarie Schieber is a research fellow at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Health Care News, Heartland’s monthly newspaper for health care reform.
