The move comes after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received pressure from the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine non-profit that he co-founded, which last month sued him over his failure to run the “statutorily required Task Force on childhood vaccine,” according to the lawsuit.
After nearly 30 years of dormancy, HHS is reinstating the Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines to develop and refine immunization guidelines for children across the country.
Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, has been tapped to head the task force, according to an HHS release on Thursday. The panel will put out regular recommendations regarding vaccine development, promotion and surveillance. The new task force will work with the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines (ACCV), a panel that reviews issues related to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
The task force will submit a formal report to Congress within two years, with updates every two years after that, according to the announcement. The group’s recommendations will help produce vaccines “that result in fewer and less serious adverse reactions than those vaccines currently on the market.”
Alongside Bhattacharya, the Task Force will also include senior officials from NIH, FDA and CDC. “We are reaffirming our commitment to rigorous science, continuous improvement, and the trust of American families,” Bhattacharya said in a prepared statement on Thursday.
The Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines was established in 1986 under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which Congress passed to ensure that the U.S. public had access to protective vaccines while also having a system for recourse in case of rare vaccine-related injuries. The group was eventually disbanded in 1998.
The revival of the task force comes after the anti-vaccine non-profit Children’s Health Defense sued HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last month, alleging that he violated the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act by keeping the vaccine safety task force dormant.
Kennedy is a co-founder of Children’s Health Defense. According to a news story on the organization’s website, Kennedy himself filed a similar complaint against HHS in 2018 after the agency failed to respond to his Freedom of Information Act requests for the biennial reports to Congress, as required by the act.
The move to reform the committee was met with some skepticism from outside experts.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaccine activist who has these fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs that vaccines are dangerous,” Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN. “He is in a position now to be able to set up task forces like this one who will find some way to support his notion that vaccines are doing more harm than good.”
In the roughly six months since taking leadership of HHS, Kennedy has already enacted several high-profile changes to U.S. vaccine policy. In June, for instance, he purged the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in a move that he said claimed was “necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science.” He later reformed the panel with fewer members, some of whom have documented histories of vaccine skepticism. He also has said he wants to overhaul the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
More recently, Kennedy cancelled 22 mRNA vaccine contracts, worth $500 million total, under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, though he later said he still believes these vaccines “may be very effective” in cancer.
