Anti-vaccine group that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded files suit against him over vaccine safety task force
'Our first priority will ALWAYS be children's health. Sec. Kennedy has FAILED 'to establish a task force dedicated to making childhood vaccines safer, as mandated by federal law,' so we WILL be holding him accountable,' Children's Health Defense said Tuesday in a post on X.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 directs the HHS secretary to establish a task force consisting of the director of the National Institutes of Health, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The NIH director is designated as chair.
According to an article posted Monday on Children's Health Defense's news site, in the years since the act was passed, no HHS secretary – including Kennedy – has ever reported to Congress on steps taken to make vaccines safer.
'This is part of the 1986 act itself,' Children's Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said in the article. 'That no secretary has done so since the passage of this law is a blow to the rule of law. I hope and trust that the current secretary will fulfill his obligation to Congress's mandate.'
The organization says attorney Ray Flores, its senior outside counsel, filed the lawsuit on its behalf. Kennedy filed a similar case in 2018 after a Freedom of Information Act request failed to produce any of the reports that are supposed to be filed under the Act.
HHS has not responded to CNN's request for comment about the new lawsuit.
'Even if it does not include the people in the [National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act], there are multiple federal committees that routinely look at vaccine safety and how to make vaccines safer. It's something that gets a lot of attention,' Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, told CNN in an email.
'This looks performative, and it may give Kennedy cover for convening this task force that he may already want to convene. It may well be collusion,' she wrote. 'To me, this looks like a way to give political cover to something the Secretary may want to do anyway (and can do without anything). The government has answers to this lawsuit, but may not want to.'
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