Anti-vaccine group that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded files lawsuit against him over vaccine safety task force

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A nonprofit anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said it is funding a lawsuit against him, in his capacity as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, for failing to establish a task force to promote the development of safer childhood vaccines.
'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 tactic is one familiar to both parties. When Kennedy was head of Children's Health Defense, he filed dozens of lawsuits against corporations and government agencies, usually over vaccines.
'It's difficult to know how much of this is performative,' Dr. Peter Hotez, who co-directs the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, said in an email. 'The steady stream of pseudoscience policies and propaganda pushed out of the Humphrey Building in Washington DC are both straight out of playbook from both RFK jr and CHD. As far as I can tell there is no real daylight between the two.'
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 task force was indeed created, but it was short-lived, issuing its final report in 1998. Since then, Kennedy has used the absence of the panel to mischaracterize the government's efforts to ensure the safety of vaccines. He's floated the idea of reviving the panel – or one like it – on vaccine safety for years.
Children's Health Defense says attorney Ray Flores, its senior outside counsel, filed the lawsuit. Kennedy filed a similar suit 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, including the 1998 report.
HHS has not responded to CNN's request for comment about the new lawsuit.
Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, also said the lawsuit 'looks performative.'
'It may give Kennedy cover for convening this task force that he may already want to convene. It may well be collusion,' she said in an email. '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.
'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,' Reiss wrote.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described who filed the lawsuit against HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The lawsuit was filed by attorney Ray Flores and Children's Health Defense says it's funding the lawsuit.