By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

On 16 March, federal judge Brian Murphy blocked the US government from making sweeping changes to the US childhood immunisation schedule, "in a blow to Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr's agenda," as the BBC expressed it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and other large medical groups had sued, saying Kennedy's changes violated federal law.

The BBC calls them respected medical groups, which they are not, as illustrated by the hepatitis B vaccine controversy. On 5 December 2025, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ended the recommendation that all newborns in the United States receive a hepatitis B shot at birth. The birth dose was recommended only if the mother had tested positive for the virus or if her infection status was unknown.

The change was very rational, and, as in Western Europe, where only Portugal recommends a universal birth dose, it would seem difficult to argue against it. But the media did and failed us badly. Two days after the vote, I downloaded news stories from 14 major media outlets, and they were all very negative.

The media gave organisations undue prominence without ever considering if they were impartial. They urged people to look to "independent recommendations," e.g. from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, for "science-based advice."

I argued that it was advice based on money. The Academy would continue to support the birth dose of the vaccine but all the journalists forgot to say that it receives many millions of dollars from vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies.

Judge Murphy also suspended Kennedy's appointments to ACIP. The BBC argued that many of the panel members were vaccine sceptics and noted that "Kennedy was a longtime antivaccine activist before joining President Donald Trump's administration."

This is so typical of irresponsible journalists. They never investigate if Kennedy's reforms are prudent and evidence-based but use ad hominem arguments to kill them. It is so low and does not further a rational healthcare; it impedes it. I have described in detail how the coverage of Kennedy's vaccine reforms in the BMJ, a major medical journal, amounts to character assassination. It is just mind-blowing that a medical journal would do this in a consecutive sample of 33 articles.

It is also false that Kennedy's new vaccine panel at the CDC are vaccine sceptics. I know several of them personally and they are highly qualified researchers who do not have the financial conflicts of interest that the old panel had, which I found was corrupt. They rubber-stamped any proposal that came forward, no matter how idiotic it was.

A spokesperson from the Department of Health and Human Services said the agency "looks forward to this judge's decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing."

The medical groups that brought the lawsuit lauded the decision, including the American Medical Association, the largest US professional organisation for doctors, which called it "an important step toward protecting the health of Americans, particularly children."

Follow the money is the best advice I can give to anyone with an interest in healthcare and in the US, virtually everything has to do with money. The American Medical Association is heavily corrupted by industry money.

Why on earth could it be a problem that Kennedy reduced the huge number of recommended vaccines in the US so that the vaccine schedule became similar to the one we have in my country, Denmark, and in many other European countries? As I have demonstrated, the reduced US childhood vaccination schedule was systematically denigrated in the media although it was a rational and evidence-based decision.

It is possible that there are some technicalities, "procedural requirements," that need to be addressed. Judge Murphy pointed these o...