There's a pattern so predictable by now it practically writes itself. The Trump administration moves to change something — anything — and within seconds, a federal lawsuit materializes, lands before a hand-picked sympathetic judge, and a sweeping injunction freezes the policy in place. Courts have intervened on immigration, energy, and federal spending. Apparently, as if that wasn’t enough, judges are now so powerful that they can control health recommendations.
Does anyone really think that an unelected judge in Boston, Mass., should be the final word on pediatric health policy? Well, it doesn’t matter, because that’s apparently how this game is played now.
Look, among other things, President Trump was reelected on the promise to make America healthy again. He appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his HHS secretary, and he has done something genuinely controversial in Washington, all in the name of making us a healthier nation. Sometimes, to make changes, you have to reform the federal bureaucracy, and naturally, that gets the left in a panic.
In January, the CDC — under Kennedy's leadership — updated the childhood immunization schedule, reducing the number of routinely recommended vaccines from 17 to 11 and downgrading six others. Kennedy also moved last June to clear out the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, firing all 17 members and replacing them with people more in line with a reassessment of vaccine science. You can agree or disagree with the substance. But these are exactly the kinds of executive-branch policy decisions that cabinet secretaries are supposed to be empowered to make.
Well, maybe just in Democratic administrations.
It should come as no surprise that it was a Biden appointee, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, who decided his gavel has more authority than the executive branch and reversed Kennedy’s reforms.
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On Monday, Murphy issued a preliminary injunction blocking the revised vaccine schedule and freezing the appointments of 13 ACIP members Kennedy installed between June 2025 and January 2026 — along with every vote those members cast. That includes a December decision to rescind the broad recommendation to vaccinate all newborns against hepatitis B.
Wiped out. By a judge.
And, it also won’t shock you that this isn’t Murphy’s first anti-Trump rodeo either. He’s been a de facto rubber stamp against the Trump on immigration policy as well.
What's remarkable here is the scope of the intervention. The judge didn't just pause a specific regulation pending review. He effectively reinstated the pre-Kennedy vaccine schedule, froze an entire federal advisory committee, canceled an ACIP meeting scheduled for this week in Atlanta, and retroactively nullified votes the restructured panel had already taken. That's not judicial review of a discrete agency action. Can you look at that and conclude this is anything other than a federal judge running health policy from a Boston courthouse?
None of this means Kennedy's reforms should be beyond scrutiny. Congress has oversight authority, and it should use it. But the left has abandoned all of that in favor of something faster and more profitable for the lawyers who fund their campaigns.
