The Department of Health and Human Services is resurrecting a long-disbanded federal panel to scrutinize childhood immunizations, fulfilling the demands of an anti-vaccine organization Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once chaired.
The Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines will “produce regular recommendations focused on the development, promotion, and refinement of childhood vaccines that result in fewer and less serious adverse reactions than those vaccines currently on the market,” the department said in a statement Thursday.
It’s the latest decision inviting vaccine skepticism into HHS. Kennedy announced earlier this month that the department was cancelling millions of dollars of contracts with companies developing mRNA vaccines. He also fired all the members of the committee that recommends which vaccines should be added to the childhood immunization schedule and replaced them with appointees of his own choosing, some of whom have a history of questioning vaccines.
The newly reestablished task force will work alongside that committee and comprise “senior leadership from NIH, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” the department said.
Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, will serve as chair of the task force.
The anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense announced last month that it was funding a lawsuit against Kennedy, accusing him of failing to establish a congressionally mandated childhood vaccine safety task force. (Kennedy chaired Children’s Health Defense from 2015 to 2023.)
The task force was originally created by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, a landmark piece of legislation in the vaccine-regulation world that also established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and created the Vaccine Information Statements patients receive before getting shots.
But while the VICP and those information statements still exist today — though the VICP has also been identified by the new administration for possible changes —- the childhood vaccine safety panel was disbanded in 1998. Vaccine skeptics have pointed to its nonexistence as evidence of a dearth of information on the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines.
Kennedy himself, along with his former campaign manager Del Bigtree, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2018 to make the task force’s reports publicly available.
When no reports were found, Kennedy and Bigtree sued HHS, claiming that the lack of reports “speaks volumes to the seriousness by which vaccine safety is treated at HHS and heightens the concern that HHS doesn’t have a clue as to the actual safety profile of the now 29 doses, and growing, of vaccines given by one year of age.” Their case was dismissed.