California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Tuesday the imminent filing of a new multi-state lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s administration, this one challenging a “decision memo” last month that demoted seven childhood vaccines from their “universally recommended” status.
The suit was set to be filed in federal court in San Francisco.
Bonta and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes will serve as co-leaders of the suit, which will be joined by 12 state attorneys general and the governor of Pennsylvania. The lawsuit will be the 59th legal action Bonta’s office has filed against the Trump administration.
Central to the new suit is a 17-member panel of medical and scientific experts known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that has long guided U.S. vaccine policy by making recommendations to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On June 9, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a longtime vaccine skeptic, announced he was firing all of the members of the ACIP panel.
According to Bonta’s office, Kennedy then replaced the members without following applicable regulations, leading to a situation where “at least nine of the 13 current ACIP members lack the expertise or professional qualifications required for the role, and a majority have publicly expressed views aligned with Secretary Kennedy’s well-documented opposition to vaccines.”
Mayes summed up the process saying, “This is not how science is supposed to work. This is not how government is supposed to work and all of it was contrary to law.”
In December, the new ACIP members voted to reverse a long-standing recommendation that the hepatitis B vaccine be universally administered at birth.
Then in January, according to the attorneys general, Jim O’Neill, then-acting head of the CDC, completely bypassed the panel and approved a “decision memo” that demoted seven vaccines to a lesser status where the decision to use them is made in individual cases by parents and their doctors.
The seven childhood vaccines are against rotavirus, meningococcal disease, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus.
The decision memo was allegedly authored by a number of federal officials including Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health and, since mid-February, the acting head of the CDC.
Public health vs. politics
Bhattacharya, a physician and former professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, is controversial for his widely circulated views that COVID did not require broad lockdowns and school closures.
Mayes said the decision to demote the vaccines was not based on new scientific evidence but was essentially a political decision. She said O’Neill had “no medical or scientific background.”
She said that the authors tried to justify the action by saying it was aligned with Denmark’s vaccine protocol. Under that protocol, the seven vaccines are not universally administered but may be used in individual cases when decided by parents in consultation with their doctors. Mayes said that the Danish approach has to be understood in light of the fact Denmark provides universal health care for its citizens, so they all have access to a doctor.
Mayes said in the U.S., a hundred million people lack regular access to a primary care doctor.
“ … the health and safety of children across the country is not a political issue.”
Attorneys General Rob Bonta and Kris Mayes
“Copying Denmark’s vaccine schedule without copying Denmark’s health care system,” Mayes said, “doesn’t give families more options, it just leaves kids unprotected from serious diseases.”
Bonta drove the point home, saying, “among children born in the U.S. between 1994 and 2023, researchers have estimated that routine childhood vaccinations prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations. And over 1.1 million deaths. All told, these vaccines have generated an estimated $2.7 trillion in societal savings.”
Bonta and Mayes excoriated the actions of the defendants, calling them “irresponsible and dangerous,” and added “the health and safety of children across the country is not a political issue.”