By MIKE MAGEE
This past week, U.S. District Court Judge Judge Brian E. Murphy, dealt Trump and RFK Jr. a severe blow. Not mincing word, he voided HHS vaccine schedule changes and labeled the action an assault on scientific integrity that was “fundamentally problematic.”
In early December, 2025, President Trump directed HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy to review the standing childhood immunization schedule. That schedule has historically guided the state school-entry requirements for vaccines as well as mandating no out-of-pocket costs to parents from vaccine insurers.
The order had followed Kennedy’s summary dismissal of all members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices replacing them with a suspect group of vaccine skeptics without any peer review.
Professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association quickly challenged the action in court.
Judge Murphy suspended the appointment of 13 of the 15 new vaccine panel members, and stated that only 6 of the 125 “even under the most generous reading, have any meaningful experience in vaccines.” The swift rebuke followed the evaluation of the new RFK Jr. appointed group’s work output by an independent coalition of scientific researchers which documented 60 misleading or false segments and vaccine claims in their inaugural December meeting.
AAP President Andrew Racine M.D. was quick to applaud the court’s decision, stating ““This decision effectively means that a science-based process for developing immunization recommendations is not to be trifled with and represents a critical step to restoring scientific decision-making to federal vaccine policy that has kept children healthy for years.”
The action couldn’t come soon enough according to state Public Health officials across the country who have been struggling to turn around a Measles epidemic tied to lax vaccination rates.
The first outbreak was reported by the Texas Department of State Health Services in West Texas in late January, 2025. By August, 2025, 762 cases had been confirmed. Ninety-nine of the patients had been hospitalized. There were two fatalities in school-aged children who lived in Gaines County, Texas. The children were not vaccinated and had no known underlying conditions.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has been tracking the spread nationwide and the results are pretty scary. In 2025, there were 2213 cases throughout the nation. 11% of the patients have required hospitalization, and several children have died of complications. In just the first 2 1/2 months of 2026, public health officials have reported 1513 cases. In the past two weeks, nearly 300 new cases have been reported. Major outbreaks are currently occurring in South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Arizona. 94% of the cases have occurred in unvaccinated patients.
We’ve known about the disease for a long, long time. The first published account dates back to Persia in the 9th century. It’s connection to a blood-born infectious agent was confirmed by Scottish physician, Francis Home, in 1757.
By 1912, the US Public Health Service deemed it a serious enough threat that reporting was now required. Over the next decade, 6000 cases on average were reported each year. By mid-century, 3 to 4 million people were infected each year, and approximately 50,000 were hospitalized and 500 died.
The first effective vaccine was licensed in 1963 by John Enders, and further refined in 1968. By 1989, it became clear that a booster would be required to reinforce waning immunity to the disease. By 2000, measles was declared eliminated thanks to an effective immunization program which reached 91% of the US population. But according to the AAP “as misinformation about vaccine safety has spread, vaccination rates have gone down and measles cases have gone up.”
A quarter of a century later, our nation finds itself in a “back to the future” quagmire. Judge Murphy has injected some sanity and paused action on all votes that were taken by the new advisers. As Trump and Kennedy complain of “judicial overreach” and a desire for “intellectual diversity” (yes, they actually have used the term), 27 states (including the Republican led states Alaska, Mississippi, New Hampshire and Nevada) have formally announced they intend to follow the recommendations of the AAP on vaccine scheduling, and ignore a CDC that appears to be “off its’ rockers.”
Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)
