By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Feb 13 (Reuters) - Major U.S. medical groups urged a judge on Friday to block the Trump administration from implementing new guidance cutting the number of vaccines routinely recommended for children and bar Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s handpicked vaccine advisory panel from holding its next meeting.
Lawyers for the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups told U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston that health officials acted unlawfully
to fulfill Kennedy's goals by upending national immunization policies in ways that would harm public health and reduce vaccination rates.
"This is a clear and present danger to public health," said James Oh, a lawyer for the groups.
He said the "most egregious" action taken under the watch of Kennedy, a long-time vaccine skeptic, was when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on January 5 issued a new immunization schedule that cut the number of routinely recommended childhood vaccinations to 11 and downgraded six others.
Oh said that decision, which removed the broad recommendation for childhood vaccines for diseases including rotavirus, influenza and hepatitis A, "set off alarms" in the medical community and occurred without any rational explanation from the agency.
Instead of a recommendation, the CDC said parents should consult healthcare providers under what it calls shared clinical-decision-making, and said insurance providers would continue to cover the costs of the shots.
Oh said the decision occurred after Kennedy last year removed and replaced all 17 independent experts on a key panel whose recommendations shape vaccine practices.
He urged the judge to prevent that panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, from holding its February 26-27 meeting. Oh said it is now dominated by people aligned with Kennedy's anti-vaccine views, in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act's mandates that it be fairly balanced and free of inappropriate influence.
Murphy, who was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden, appeared open to arguments the panel was unlawfully constituted and asked whether he could consider the "broader public health impacts" of the vaccine policy changes.
U.S. Department of Justice lawyer Isaac Belfer told him HHS was not pursuing an anti-vaccine agenda and welcomed "spirited debate about vaccine policy." But he said it had broad authority to change policy to address a decline in public trust in vaccines following the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The court cannot substitute its judgment in place of the agency," Belfer said.
Murphy did not immediately rule but, with the meeting upcoming, said he "must make a decision in this case on an uncomfortably tight timeline."
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
