A legal win for vaccines. But chaos is the point.
Plus, on Friday we'll speak to the AAP lawyer who delivered us the victory.
On Monday, a judge’s ruling delivered a blow to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s overt attack on US vaccine policy. Today’s Inside Medicine comes in four sections. Note that we’ll be going live with the lawyer behind the American Academy of Pediatrics’ key legal win on Friday at 2:30 pm ET (Join us!)
A judge delivers for vaccines.
Since taking office, Kennedy has, in essence, hijacked the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). A judicial stay earlier this week means that, for now, important changes Secretary Kennedy jammed through over the last year have been reversed, including:
Sudden changes in the CDC’s Covid-19 vaccine recommendations (outside of the usual transparent process involving ACIP).
The ACIP’s revised pediatric vaccine schedule (which included eliminating the recommendation for routine administration of the Hepatitis B vaccine birth dose).
Kennedy’s newly installed ACIP members’ appointments were recalled (they didn’t genuinely go through the legally required vetting).
Because its voting members have now been benched, the scheduled ACIP meeting this week has also been canceled. This is all good news, for obvious reasons. But there’s a larger problem…
Chaos is the point.
Regardless of the final outcome (the Trump administration will certainly appeal the decision), long-term damage has already been done. Because of President Trump’s executive orders and Secretary Kennedy’s policies, the CDC’s website is chaotically unreliable in the most confusing of ways. It’s neither reliably reliable nor reliably unreliable. It depends on the page. So how is the public to tell which CDC webpages to believe and which to ignore? It’s not easy; it’s not like there’s any indication that the information on a page has (or has not) been tainted by Secretary Kennedy’s edicts. Yes, most of the pages are dated, so older pages remain accurate. But newly edited ones could either reflect genuinely data-driven updates from CDC scientists or be updates reflecting Trump-era nonsense. It often takes careful scrutiny to make the distinction—and people are on the CDC site looking for efficient answers.
It would actually be easier (though tragic), if I knew I could not refer patients to the CDC’s website. But I can’t abandon it entirely because so much of what’s there is really, really good. If you Google lead poisoning, heart disease prevention, or smoking risks, excellent CDC websites appear at the top of the search. But don’t Google “CDC, vaccines, and autism,” unless you want an ulcer.
I think that’s the point. Secretary Kennedy wants us to keep using the CDC site as a trusted source of information. He just wants some of the pages—his hobby horses—to reflect his warped view on vaccines. He wants genuine CDC expertise to next to his drivel.
Even in light of the latest legal victory, the part of the public that still believes in science (i.e., most of us, actually), is wary of the CDC now, thanks to Secretary Kennedy and President Trump. As Dr. Danielle Ofri wrote last year, the concept of medical expertise summarized simply by using the word “we”—that is “we recommend”—is now lost.
Now that the CDC’s website is no longer reliably reliable, the public has entered a medical information diaspora. The information is out there, but you have to seek it out, curate it, and vet it for yourself. Sometimes it’s challenging to distinguish a good resource from mediocre or even bad ones. That’s what made the pre-Trump 2.0 CDC website so great. In almost all instances, we knew that what you’d find was good.
For Kennedy and his allies, this is mission accomplished.
Still, we must soldier on. This week’s legal victory is evidence that we can win.
We’re talking to the victorious AAP lawyer tomorrow.
Tomorrow, Friday March 20 at 2:30 pm ET, Richard Hughes, the victorious lawyer for the American Academy of Pediatrics, will join me in The Doctor’s Lounge on Substack Live! To join us, click this link.
Please submit your questions in the comment section.
About our guest: Richard H. Hughes IV, JD, MPH is a partner with Epstein, Becker & Green PC, a Washington DC law firm, and a professional lecturer in law at The George Washington University Law School. He has devoted the past two decades to improving access to vaccines. Richard was formerly vice president of public policy at Moderna, guiding the company’s policy strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the lead counsel in AAP v. Kennedy, a lawsuit challenging the actions of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with respect to vaccine policy. He serves on the board of Vaccinate Your Family, a nonprofit organization committed to protecting people of all ages from vaccine-preventable diseases.
Bonus analysis from our friends.
Some friends of Inside Medicine have already opined on all of this. Check these out…
In You Can Know Things, Dr. Kristin Panthagani highlighted some key moments from the judge’s ruling. I found this brief piece to be informative and cathartic.
The New York Times: Doctors Say Court Ruling Can’t Undo Kennedy’s Vaccine Damage, by Maggie Astor and Dani Blum, with quotes from my good friend Dr. Megan Ranney (Dean of the Yale School of Public Health).
MedPage Today published an opinion by Richard Hughes in which he argues why process matters so much. We’ll discuss this tomorrow.
That’s all for now. Thank you for reading! If you have information about any of the unfolding stories we are following, please email me or find me on Signal at InsideMedicine.88.
It's so true...it takes longer and longer to figure out what the most reliable information is. One feels like she has to understand or learn about everything these days as, which no one person can possible do, because the amount of misinformation, incompetence, or just complacency is so pervasive everywhere you look. This means anxiety is just a constant state of being. It's totally exhausting.