A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled on March 16 that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. illegally appointed 13 new members to an influential vaccine panel beginning last June.

District Judge Brian Murphy also said that previous votes from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) are invalid and blocked the government’s new vaccine schedule for children.

Murphy ruled Kennedy and other federal officials committed “a technical, procedural failure” by skirting around the ACIP in January to narrow vaccine recommendations for children.

Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that “this decision effectively means that a science-based process for developing immunization recommendations is not to be trifled with and represents a critical step to restoring scientific decision-making to federal vaccine policy that has kept children healthy for years.”

Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement, “We look forward to this judge’s decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing.”

Murphy said the government committed a similar mistake by removing the previous members of that committee, and replacing them “without undertaking any of the rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades.”

The plaintiffs, led by the American Academy of Pediatrics, originally sued after Kennedy ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop recommending the COVID-19 vaccine for pregnant women and healthy children.

The suit was later expanded to challenge the restructuring of the ACIP, its changes to vaccine recommendations, and the January update by federal officials that did not involve ACIP.

Kennedy fired all 17 members of the ACIP in June 2025.

“The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas,” Kennedy said in a statement when dismissing the previous members.

Lawyers from the Justice Department had argued earlier this month that the plaintiffs and courts had no authority to review Kennedy’s decisions about the vaccine committee.

“What they want this court to do is supervise vaccine policy indefinitely,” government attorney Isaac Belfer said during the hearing.

The judge found that the new member appointments violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires members of such panels to “maintain a fair balance on its committees and to avoid inappropriate influences by both the appointing authority and any special interest.”

It also violated ACIP’s own rules requiring members to have “expertise in the field of immunization practices,” he wrote.

“First, of the fifteen members currently on ACIP, even under the most generous reading, only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines—the very focus of ACIP,” Murphy wrote.

The process of appointing new members to ensure a balanced committee had previously involved broad outreach to potential candidates, and had taken around two years, he noted.

“Defendants have provided no explanation for their disregard of the requirements laid out in ACIP’s Charter,” and other policy documents, Murphy wrote.

He also found that then-CDC Director Jim O'Neill’s January memo changing the vaccination schedule for children was “arbitrary and capricious” because he “abandoned the agency’s longstanding practice of getting recommendations from ACIP before changing the immunization schedules without sufficient explanation.”

Zachary Stieber and Reuters contributed to this report.