A federal judge is once again blocking President Donald Trump from making key executive branch changes in policy, this time targeting childhood vaccination rules. Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction Monday barring Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from adjusting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) childhood vaccination schedule on the advice of a collection of independent advisors, scientists, and health experts.

In January, Kennedy adjusted the childhood vaccination schedule, cutting the number of vaccines recommended for children by more than one-third, including terminating recommendations that children receive the COVID-19, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, and hepatitis A and B vaccinations. The American Academy of Pediatrics and a handful of other organizations filed a lawsuit to block the vaccine schedule changes from taking place, citing Kennedy’s reconstitution of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

In his injunction, Murphy charged that Kennedy’s HHS had “disregarded” scientific methodology related to vaccination and legal procedures governing HHS’s actions and had “thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.” He wrote, “First, the Government bypassed ACIP to change the immunization schedules, which is both a technical, procedural failure itself and a strong indication of something more fundamentally problematic: an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee.” Murphy also derided Kennedy’s reconstitution of ACIP as a “procedural failure” which he said “highlights the very reasons why procedures exist and raises a substantial likelihood that the newly appointed ACIP fails to comport with governing law.”

Accordingly, Murphy not only ordered a halt to the revised childhood vaccination schedule but also paused the appointment of Kennedy’s ACIP members. While the judge did not bar the committee from hosting meetings, including one scheduled for this week, he did stay further ACIP votes on policy changes.

On “Washington Watch” Tuesday night, Dr. Robert W. Malone, a biochemist involved in vaccine creation and one of Kennedy’s handpicked ACIP members, alleged that Murphy’s injunction was timed to be released shortly before the next ACIP meeting, “apparently in order to cause the maximum chaos.” Malone said of Murphy, “This is an explicitly activist judge who has repeatedly made decisions that seem to be specifically designed to create chaos for the Trump administration, particularly in the area of immigration policy.”

The biochemist noted that many of Murphy’s activist rulings have been overturned by higher courts. Recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit halted an order from Murphy that would have barred the Trump administration from deporting illegal immigrants to designated third countries. He said, “This is an explicitly activist judge with a long history of judicial activism.”

Malone recounted that he himself chaired the last ACIP meeting, which focused on administering the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns. That was “a specific topic that the president had a particular interest in seeing addressed by ACIP,” he said. “We reviewed the evidence, including new evidence from the CDC itself regarding the logic supporting childhood hepatitis B vaccination, and made a decision that this was inappropriate to strongly recommend, and, in many states, mandate.” Malone noted that the instances of hepatitis B in infants are almost nonexistent, except in cases where the mother is hepatitis B positive. “Immediately after that, the president announced a directive that he wanted to see a major restructuring of the entire vaccine schedule to bring it into alignment with Western norms.”

“This isn’t radical. This isn’t an anti-vaxxer position. The president explicitly wanted to see a review and decisions that would bring the American vaccine schedule — which is the most aggressive in the world, bar none — in alignment with peer Western countries,” Malone reported. “It was a presidential directive, and the response was well-justified, rigorous, based on a structured analysis of the schedules of peer countries across the world, particularly in the West,” he continued. Malone also noted that, as an advisory committee, ACIP did not itself adjust the childhood vaccination, as Murphy implied, but recommended to HHS leadership that it be revised. “This was not done under ACIP structure, and it is not necessary to do so.”

Malone also shared that, under Murphy’s injunction, ACIP members are no longer allowed to communicate as a group, only on a one-on-one basis. “So basically, ACIP is frozen, unable to act, unable to communicate, and the vaccine [guidances] for children … have been rescinded,” he said, anticipating that kids in low-income families will be directly impacted by not having access to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) monoclonal antibodies.