Richard H. Hughes, IV, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, co-authored an article in STAT News, titled “HHS Secretary Kennedy Told Us Not to Listen to Him. We Agree.”
Following is an excerpt:
As health lawyers with a combined 70 years in the field — one of us served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices while the other served as an executive of a major pharmaceutical company during the Covid pandemic — we understand the boundaries of our expertise. We wouldn’t attempt to construe vaccine science or dissuade patients from making vaccination decisions in consultation with their health care professionals. Nor would we be the right people to undertake the type of deep scientific review that lies at the heart of immunization policy development. To put it mildly, most lawyers (us included) are not public health experts, and we would never pretend we were.
This is precisely why Health and Human Services Secretary (and longtime lawyer) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent actions around the Covid vaccine are such a matter of concern. Flanked by his National Institutes of Health director and Food and Drug Administration commissioner in a bizarre video that notably excluded CDC immunization experts, he declared that pregnant women and children should not be vaccinated against Covid-19. This statement came just a week after he told members of Congress they shouldn’t listen to him for medical advice. We agree.
During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy promised that he would not interfere with established immunization schedules. Yet in a matter of days, he has lurched from refusing to recommend vaccinating against measles to, without evidence, attempting to alter the national vaccine schedule for pregnant women, babies, and children. These are the very parts of the U.S. population whose health and well-being are perhaps uppermost in the mind of public health and for whom evidence-based decision-making is of the utmost policy importance.
