Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has joined President Donald Trump in a renewed effort to challenge how the United States formulates its childhood vaccine recommendations.
In a Request for Information (RFI) posted on Friday and published Monday in the Federal Register, Kennedy has asked for public comment over the next 30 days on whether vaccine classifications should be adjusted.
The RFI includes a lengthy rehashing of U.S. vaccine recommendations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and how “public trust in Federal public health agencies declined measurably.”
“The durability of any vaccine recommendation framework depends on the public’s trust in the process that produces it,” Kennedy wrote. “Trust is essential both to public health objectives and to effective, informed individual choice.”
The RFI comes two weeks after Trump signed an executive order that called for reducing the number of childhood vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 17 to 11. He added that decisions “should be aligned with scientific evidence and best practices from peer, developed countries.”
In the RFI, Kennedy asks if there should be a new way to categorize vaccine recommendations. The three current categories are—vaccines used universally for all children, vaccines for certain high-risk groups and vaccines based on shared clinical decision-making (SCDM).
“Do the current categories unintentionally imply that parental permission, individual consent, or meaningful clinical discussion applies only to shared clinical decision-making recommendations?” Kennedy wrote.
The HHS also wants to find out if people understand if the categories “convey meaningful differences in the strength of evidence” about the vaccines and the “magnitude” of their benefits individually and to the overall population. The HHS asks as well if the categories leave room for “individual circumstances and values.”
The new push by Trump and Kennedy comes after a U.S. judge in March blocked the government’s decision early this year to ditch routine recommendations for six vaccines in the childhood vaccination schedule.
The move by the HHS prompted an outcry from scientific and medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which filed the lawsuit that yielded the legal blockade. The Boston judge sided with the AAP, ruling that Kennedy acted unlawfully when he dismissed all members of the FDA's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes vaccine recommendations to the CDC, and reloaded it with his own appointees.