The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is resurrecting a task force on childhood vaccine safety, reopening a decades-old debate that’s now taking center stage—with its own Secretary in the spotlight.
The Hill reported that this move follows a lawsuit initiated and funded by Children’s Health Defense, the very anti-vaccine advocacy group founded by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
HHS is reinstating the long-dormant vaccine safety task force that had been shelved for years, this time with fresh scrutiny and a much more controversial origin story.
The lawsuit behind the revival was pushed forward after Kennedy’s group filed a Freedom of Information Act request back in 2018 in search of vaccine safety data.
When HHS couldn’t deliver those reports, Kennedy and fellow vaccine skeptic Del Bigtree took legal action, demanding accountability and transparency from the very agency Kennedy now heads. The lawsuit set the stage for a bureaucratic cleanup that’s raising eyebrows across medical and political circles alike.
The revamped task force will examine the childhood immunization schedule, a federal guideline that dictates vaccine timing for millions of American kids.
That schedule has long been a flashpoint for critics who believe bureaucrats shouldn’t be the final word on their children’s health.
Despite voicing support for the vaccine schedule during his job interview for HHS Secretary, Kennedy has also insisted on digging deeper into long-standing concerns. That dual stance—supportive in public, but skeptical in practice—has only fueled more polarization around the decision.
The task force won’t be confined to a single agency. It will pull from senior leadership across the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Conveniently, Kennedy placed NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya—the only physician in the group publicly aligned with his reform push—as chairman.
The NIH hasn’t traditionally played a role in vaccine safety oversight, a job typically handled by the CDC and FDA.
That unorthodox involvement may shift the balance of scientific inquiry from enforcement to investigation, a move long desired by Kennedy’s original support base.
Bhattacharya celebrated the announcement, calling it a reaffirmation of "rigorous science" and “the trust of American families.” But not everyone’s clapping for the reboot—with critics suggesting there's more politics than progress here.
Professor Dorit Reiss of UC San Francisco called the task force “another politically-controlled forum,” warning it could damage the business and credibility of vaccine development. That kind of skepticism, ironically, sounds an awful lot like what Kennedy’s critics once accused him of.
So far, vaccine safety experts argue that the existing immunization process is already subjected to years of trial, oversight, and post-approval scrutiny.
But Kennedy’s decades-long doubts over vaccines—going as far back as widely accepted shots like MMR—don’t seem to fade with titles or office appointments.
It’s a rare case where an activist becomes the regulator, then uses government authority to deliver on the very lawsuit his nonprofit funded. As CEO of Children’s Health Defense, Mary Holland put it, “It took nearly 50 years… but at last the Secretary is following the law.”
Supporters insist this is about transparency and giving parents back control over medical decisions. They say the revival of the task force doesn’t reject science—it just demands accountability in how that science is implemented.
But critics believe the optics are hard to ignore. The Secretary of HHS is seemingly granting his former allies exactly what they asked for, raising real concerns about conflicts of interest and ideological policymaking.