Eliminating seven childhood vaccines from their recommended status will make children sicker and strain state resources, court documents say.
Fifteen states have brought a lawsuit over a new vaccine policy that eliminates seven childhood immunizations from the vaccine schedule.
Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, as well as Gov. Josh Shapiro, as governor of Pennsylvania, are suing the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its acting director Javanta Bhattacharya.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court for the northern district of California on Tuesday over a January decision in a decision memo issued by the CDC.
The memo “delivered an unprecedented attack on the nation’s evidence-based childhood immunization schedule,” the plaintiffs said.
RFK Jr. “an anti-vaccine activist” and the CDC stripped seven childhood vaccines of their universally recommended status in favor of “senseless complexity that will make children sicker and strain state resources,” they said. “The Kennedy Schedule is the culmination of a series of unlawful actions in furtherance of Secretary Kennedy’s idiosyncratic and unscientific hostility to vaccines.”
WHY THIS MATTERS
States called Kennedy’s actions a “radical departure” from the former Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) policy.
Kennedy promised Congress during his confirmation process that he would leave the ACIP undisturbed, according to court documents. However, in June 2025, Kennedy fired all 17 ACIP voting members and replaced them with a majority of his own “anti-vaccine acolytes,” states said.
ACIP then reversed nearly 30 years of CDC policy recommending that the hepatitis B vaccine be universally administered at birth as part of a three-dose series, in favor of the recommendation that the vaccine should generally not be administered at birth and that subsequent doses should be contingent on consultation and testing, according to court documents.
On January 5, 2026, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jayanta Bhattacharya, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Mehmet Oz and the Commissioner of Food and Drugs Martin Makary, bypassed ACIP and presented the decision memo to then acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill, urging him to remove seven vaccines from the CDC’s list of universally recommended childhood vaccines.
O’Neill signed the decision memo that same day, removing vaccines for rotavirus, meningococcal disease, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (“RSV”).
The states seek declaratory and injunctive relief to declare the Kennedy Schedule and the appointments of the Kennedy Appointees unlawful and to have them set aside.
THE LARGER TREND
Among children born in the U.S. between 1994 and 2023, researchers have estimated that “routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion,” according to court documents.