AAP v. Kennedy is the lawsuit in which the institutional vaccine establishment, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics, is asking a federal court to undo what Secretary Kennedy, the CDC, and the reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices have done over the past year: moving several childhood vaccines from a universal recommendation to shared clinical decision-making, removing the COVID-19 shot from the recommended schedule for healthy children and pregnant women, and reconstituting the advisory committee that recommends what goes on the schedule and what comes off. And on March 16, 2026, District Judge Brian Murphy granted that request for the duration of the case.

In the Trenches
I am deep in the trenches in this case, representing two mothers of dead children who followed the AAP and the CDC’s recommendations, two physicians who lost their medical licenses for not following those recommendations, and Children’s Health Defense, an organization founded by Secretary Kennedy that is also, bless their souls, funding this suit.

The case is being fought on two fronts at the same time. The District of Massachusetts and the First Circuit, with paper flying back and forth between them. We are taking incoming from friends and foes alike. The government keeps saying that they are protecting our interests, but it has a funny way of showing it, and like they say, with friends like that…

This post is an update from the trenches but first, let’s revisit how we got here.

The Secretary Moves Fast out the Gate

On May 19, 2025, the Secretary signed a directive removing the COVID-19 vaccine from the recommended childhood schedule for healthy children and pregnant women. He announced it publicly on May 27. Three weeks later, on June 9, he retired all seventeen sitting members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and began appointing replacements. The reconstituted ACIP held its first meeting on June 25-27, 2025. In September, it voted to move COVID-19 vaccines to shared clinical decision-making, ratifying the Secretary’s earlier directive.

In December, it revised the Hepatitis B birth-dose recommendation. On January 5, 2026, Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill issued a memorandum revising the entire childhood immunization schedule, moving six vaccines to shared clinical decision-making and reducing the number of recommended disease categories from seventeen to eleven. Each ACIP vote and each CDC action was the Secretary’s committee and the Secretary’s agency executing the policy direction the Secretary had set.

The Vaccine Pushers Fight Back Against Every Change

AAP filed its initial complaint a few weeks after Kennedy retired the original ACIP. AAP amended every time the agency acted. Over the next ten months, AAP amended three times, each time to capture the next agency action. By January 19, 2026, AAP was back in court asking to amend a fourth time, this time to challenge Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill’s January 5 memorandum revising the childhood immunization schedule. A week later, on January 26, AAP moved for a preliminary injunction asking Judge Brian Murphy to freeze the schedule and the reconstituted ACIP.

The government filed its opposition on February 9. The opposition pressed jurisdictional grounds. It pressed deference under FACA. What it did not do was defend the substance. It did not explain why the schedule revision made sense. It did not explain why Secretary Kennedy’s new ACIP appointees were qualified for the work. It addressed the appointees’ credentials by linking the court to the ACIP page on the CDC website and saying nothing more.

Alarms Go Off

That set off the alarms. Children’s Health Defense and I decided that the people who actually believed in what Secretary Kennedy and the agency had done needed to be in the courtroom defending it because the government was not going to.

The judge set a two-part preliminary injunction hearing, the first on February 13 and the second on March 4. We had five days before the first hearing.

Phase 1. The Opening Salvo. February 18-23, 2026.

On February 18, we moved to intervene in the case for Andrea Shaw, whose 18-month-old twins Dallas and Tyson died on May 1, 2025, eight days after their well-baby vaccines; Shanticia Nelson, whose daughter Sa’Niya Carter died on March 27, 2025, less than twelve hours after a single visit with six injections containing twelve antigens; Drs. Paul Thomas and Kenneth Stoller, two pediatricians delicensed for challenging the existing childhood vaccine schedule; and Children’s Health Defense, both an intervenor and the funder of the defense effort.

We filed five things that day. The Emergency Motion to Intervene. The Proposed Answer with Counterclaim, which laid out the substantive defense the government had not made. A Memorandum in Support of the Motion. An Affidavit in Support. An Addendum that included a proposed order opposing AAP’s preliminary injunction. We came in loaded.

Five days later, after AAP and the government signaled their opposition, we filed more. A supplemental memorandum aimed at the March 4 hearing. A second affidavit. On February 26, AAP filed its opposition. The government filed its opposition the same day. Well, at least we got them to agree on something.

Phase 2. The First Loss. February 27, 2026.

We filed our reply, with the supporting motion for leave, that morning. By the end of the day, the court denied intervention in a one-sentence electronic order. Welcome to file an amicus, the court said. Six days later, our reply motion was marked moot. The denial had already decided it.

Phase 3. The Amici, the Hearings, and the Stay Order. February 13 to March 16, 2026.

The amici on AAP’s side were a coalition of the institutional vaccine establishment. Twenty medical organizations led by the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists asked the court to undo what Kennedy had done. America’s Physician Groups together with the American Association of Immunologists made the same ask in a separate brief. The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society did the same. The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, the American College of Chest Physicians, the American Thoracic Society, the Network for Public Health Law, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation made the same ask in a brief joined by 119 named deans, chairs, and public-health-school scholars.

Eleven public-health and administrative-law scholars in their own brief made the same ask. An organization called Defend Public Health filed twice. Almost every major vaccine-promoting institution in the country was in the case on the plaintiffs’ side, and every brief asked Judge Murphy to undo Secretary Kennedy’s first year.

And then there was us

Standing against them on the substance, we filed our amicus brief on March 9, with a supporting declaration and appendices. We made the substantive defense the government had not made.

The two preliminary injunction hearings happened on February 13 and March 4. AAP brought ten supplemental declarations into the fight in two waves. We were not allowed to brief or argue at either hearing. We were allowed to be in the room, like any member of the public.

On March 16, Judge Murphy granted the preliminary injunction in part. The order did three things. It froze Acting Director O’Neill’s January 5 schedule revision, the one that had moved six vaccines to shared clinical decision-making and reduced the number of recommended disease categories from seventeen to eleven. It stayed the appointments of thirteen of the fifteen voting ACIP members, the ones Secretary Kennedy had appointed in three waves on June 11, September 11, and January 13. And it nullified every vote the reconstituted ACIP had taken since Kennedy’s first day in office. Three actions, one order.

Almost everything Secretary Kennedy and the agency had done in their first year, frozen.
The court was not required to weigh our amicus in the irreparable-harm balance, and it did not. The injuries proposed intervenors had described, including the deaths of Dallas and Tyson Shaw and Sa’Niya Carter, were not on the scale. The people who had suffered them were not parties to the case.

Phase 4. To the First Circuit. March 25 to April 9, 2026.

On March 25, we filed the Notice of Appeal. The notice designated both the February 27 intervention denial and the March 16 preliminary injunction. Two orders, one appeal. The First Circuit docketed it as No. 26-1325.

Days later, we filed the Emergency Motion for Stay Pending Appeal. We asked the First Circuit to stay Judge Murphy’s preliminary injunction so the schedule revision and the ACIP appointments could resume operation while we litigated the appeal.

On April 9, the First Circuit denied the emergency motion without prejudice. The order cited FRAP 8(a)(1)(A), which requires a stay of an injunction to be sought first in the district court. The First Circuit sent us back to Judge Murphy.

Phase 5. Two Courthouses at the Same Time. April 15 to May 1, 2026.

This is where the trenches metaphor stops being a metaphor.

On April 15, the government moved in the First Circuit to have our appeal thrown out. The argument was that the government adequately represents our interests. The same government that had not defended the substance below.

On April 20, we filed our Rule 62(d) motion in the district court. We brought the case Judge Murphy had not yet seen. On April 1, 2026, Secretary Kennedy had filed a renewed ACIP charter under FACA, expanding the listed expertise categories to include toxicology, pediatric neurodevelopment, epidemiology, data science, statistical analysis, health economics, and recovery from serious vaccine injuries. The renewed charter directed ACIP to consider cumulative exposures to vaccines and vaccine components, to engage in re-analysis of vaccine safety and efficacy as gaps are identified, to evaluate variability in immune response across populations, and to consider novel vaccine platforms including mRNA.

No party had presented the renewed charter to Judge Murphy. We did. My Declaration walked through every ACIP appointee Murphy had questioned, member by member, with documented training, employment, and publication record tied to the renewed charter’s expertise categories. Hibbeln’s NIH career on prenatal exposures and child neurodevelopment fit “pediatric neurodevelopment.” Milhoan’s PhD in mechanisms of myocardial inflammation fit the directive to evaluate the dominant adverse event signal from mRNA vaccines. Levi’s MIT operations management work fit “data science,” “statistical analysis,” and “health economics.” Each of the nine members the court had questioned fit at least one expertise category enumerated in the renewed charter.

We also answered the question Judge Murphy had asked at footnote 56 of his preliminary injunction order, where he wrote that there might be evidence to demonstrate that each ACIP member had more relevant expertise than what was before the court at that point. The government had not supplied it. We did.

On April 21, AAP moved in the First Circuit to throw out the preliminary-injunction portion of our
appeal. The argument was that intervention denial and preliminary injunction are separate orders, that we cannot bring the second up on the appeal of the first.

On April 23, the government filed its stay motion in the district court. Not a stay of the preliminary injunction. A stay of proceedings while it decided whether to appeal. We will come back to that one.

On April 24, AAP filed a joinder in the government’s motion to summarily affirm the intervention denial. Once again the parties agreed that the mothers of the dead children who followed AAP’s and the CDC’s vaccine schedule recommendations did not deserve to be parties, even though three Jane Doe pregnant women who had trouble getting a COVID booster shot were parties.

On April 27, we filed our opposition to the government’s First Circuit motion to throw out our appeal on denial of intervention. We argued that adequacy of representation rests on interest-alignment, and that the government’s interest is institutional while ours is in the substantive policy changes Kennedy had made.

The government’s own April 23 filing in the district court proves the divergence: the government told Judge Murphy that the preliminary injunction freezing Kennedy’s substantive actions remained in full effect and continued to protect plaintiffs against any irreparable harm. A party defending the substance moves to stay the injunction. The government did not.

On April 29, the government filed its Notice of Appeal of the preliminary injunction. The First Circuit docketed it as No. 26-1503.

On the morning of May 1, we filed our opposition to AAP’s motion to throw out the preliminary-injunction portion of our appeal. The argument: we are appealing both the intervention denial and the preliminary injunction together because the second flows from the first, and First Circuit precedent holds that successful intervention reversal entails vacatur of the underlying order.

That same morning, AAP filed its opposition to the government’s stay-of-proceedings motion. AAP took the same position the government had taken: the preliminary injunction remains in full effect and protects plaintiffs. The plaintiffs and the government were now in alignment that the injunction stayed.

In the afternoon of May 1, Judge Murphy denied the government’s stay-of-proceedings motion because it had not shown “good cause” for the stay and noted that the government had moved to stay proceedings pending an appeal that did not yet exist.

On Monday May 4, we will file our response to AAP’s joinder motion to throw out our appeal.
That’s a lot of moving pieces. So much for slowing down in my golden years.
***
Circling Back to Last Year

This is not the first time CHD and I have been in this lane. In April 2025, I filed Cardenas v. Monarez in the Central District of California on behalf of Dr. Samara Cardenas, a pediatrician in Anaheim with 1,900 Medicaid kids on her panel. Dr. Cardenas had decided in her professional judgment that healthy children did not need a COVID-19 shot. The CDC’s Vaccines for Children program responded by freezing her ability to order any vaccines, not just the COVID shot, on the ground that participating providers had to order every ACIP-recommended vaccine in their patient population. CalOptima then terminated her Medicaid contract and reassigned her 1,900 children to other providers. She closed her practice. The complaint asked the federal court to move the COVID-19 shot from recommended to shared clinical decision making. On May 19, 2025, Secretary Kennedy knocked the shot off the schedule (for kids and pregnant women). We voluntarily dismissed Cardenas in August 2025 with the relief secured (or so we thought).

In late August 2025, after the Cardenas dismissal, I filed Thomas v. Monarez, now Thomas v. Bhattacharya after the NIH Director substitution, in the District of D.C. Thomas is the broader APA and constitutional challenge to the entire CDC Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule, the contraindications framework, and the binding effect of ACIP recommendations through statutory incorporation in over 600 state laws. The complaint asks the court to move all of the recommended childhood vaccines to shared clinical decision-making. Plaintiffs include Drs. Thomas and Stoller, two of the proposed intervenors in AAP v. Kennedy. The government’s motion to dismiss is pending.

Two cases foreshadowed where Secretary Kennedy and his reconstituted ACIP later moved on policy. The intervention motion in February was the third leg of a fight that had already been running for a year.

Golden years will have to wait, or maybe these are them?

What the Government Has Actually Been Doing

In the First Circuit, on April 15, the government moved to throw our appeal out. The government argued that it adequately represents our interests, and we should not be heard. Eight days later, in the district court, the government filed something different. Not a stay of the injunction freezing Kennedy’s first year. A stay of proceedings. And it told Judge Murphy this:
The Court’s preliminary relief order remains in full effect and continues to protect Plaintiffs against any irreparable harm.

The stayed appointments to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (“ACIP”) remain stayed; the votes of the reconstituted ACIP remain stayed; and immunization schedules that do not reflect those votes or the January 2026 changes remain in place. Thus, Plaintiffs (and the public) will continue to be protected from any irreparable harm during a stay of proceedings.

A stay of proceedings would not harm Plaintiffs (or the public) because the Court’s preliminary relief order remains in full effect.
Any benefits to patients, providers, or the public health from the Court’s preliminary relief order also continue.

That is the Department of Justice telling a federal judge that the order freezing the schedule revision, the order freezing the ACIP appointments, the order nullifying every vote the reconstituted ACIP took, is protective. Beneficial. Should remain in place.

They keep saying they are on our side. They have a funny way of showing it.

A party suffering irreparable harm from an injunction moves to stay the injunction. The government did not. A party defending the substance of what the injunction enjoined defends that substance. The government did not. A party telling the court the injunction protects against irreparable harm has just told the court the injunction is correct. The government did.
Whatever the Department of Justice thinks it is doing in AAP v. Kennedy, it is not defending what Secretary Kennedy and his reconstituted ACIP did during the first year of his tenure. It is institutionally appealing because the case has institutional implications. It is not substantively defending because, on the substance, the record below now shows it endorses the injunction it appealed. Perhaps in a year or 20 months, they government might win the appeal and get the case dismissed. I hope so, but I don’t think that’s enough, and certainly not soon enough.

What We Have Actually Been Doing

The Rule 62(d) motion is the substantive defense the government has not made. The motion put the renewed charter in front of Judge Murphy. It walked through every ACIP appointee the court had questioned. It explained why each appointee fit at least one of the expertise categories the renewed charter now lists. It tied each fit to documented training and publication, to specific provisions of the renewed charter, and to the substantive work the renewed charter directs ACIP to do.

The motion also surfaced the Institute of Medicine’s findings. In 2002, the IOM recommended that the CDC conduct retrospective studies comparing health outcomes between fully vaccinated and unvaccinated children using the Vaccine Safety Datalink. In 2013, the IOM confirmed those studies had still never been done and that the research was feasible. In the twenty-plus years since the first recommendation, no CDC Director acted on it. The prior ACIP charter never directed the committee to consider cumulative effects.

The prior ACIP membership did not include the disciplines needed to design or evaluate such studies. The renewed charter changes both. It directs ACIP to consider cumulative exposures, to re-analyze safety and efficacy as gaps are identified, to evaluate variability in immune response across populations. It expands the listed expertise categories to include the disciplines, like data science, statistical analysis, health economics, toxicology, pediatric neurodevelopment, that correspond to the work the IOM said was overdue.

The motion answers the question Judge Murphy asked. The renewed charter starts the process of answering the question the IOM asked twenty plus years ago.

What Comes Next

The next moves belong to the courts. The district court will rule on our Rule 62(d) motion. The motion is a long shot. We will know soon.

The First Circuit will rule on the government’s motion to throw our appeal out, the one AAP has now joined. That is the threshold question. If the First Circuit grants the motion, our appeal ends. The intervention denial stands. The preliminary injunction stands. The only remaining play is an application to the Supreme Court. That is a long shot on a long shot, because the government doesn’t think it needs immediate relief even though it claims to be irreparably injury. But in cards and life, you play the cards you’re dealt.

If the First Circuit lets the appeal proceed, we have a different problem and a better one. Assuming Judge Murphy denies the Rule 62(d) motion, we renew the motion for a stay in the First Circuit, this time with the lower court’s denial supplying the FRAP 8(a)(1)(A) procedural foundation the First Circuit said it needed. We then move to consolidate our appeal with the government’s appeal of the preliminary injunction, the one filed April 29 and now docketed at 26-1503. Once consolidated, the panel has the full picture and at least one party in the case is asking the court to stop the operational effect of the Stay Order. The government, on the record below, is not.

The dispatches will keep coming. Two courthouses, with paper still flying back and forth. AAP has the AMA and ACOG and twenty more behind it. The government has filed an appeal it cannot stay. Andrea Shaw, Shanticia Nelson, Drs. Thomas and Stoller, and Children’s Health Defense are still here, still defending what Secretary Kennedy and his reconstituted ACIP did during their first year, (for now anyway).

Rick Jaffe, Esq.