RFK Stacks Vaccine Panel: Judge Smacks Him Down

Judge Brian E. Murphy: ORDER entered. MEMORANDUM AND ORDER on Plaintiffs' Motion for Preliminary Injunction. Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief is GRANTED in part.(i) The Court STAYS the January 2026 Memo revising the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 705. (ii) The Court STAYS the appointments of the thirteen ACIP members appointed on June 11, 2025, September 11, 2025, and January 13, 2026. (iii) The Court further STAYS all votes taken by the now-stayed ACIP.(MBM) (Entered: 03/16/2026)

Federal District Judge Brian Murphy:

“Science,” like law, “is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge.”  Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 29 (1997).  History is littered with once-universal truths that have since come under scrutiny.  Nevertheless, science is still “the best we have.”  Id.1   

“Procedure is to law what scientific method is to science.”  In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 21 (1967) (cleaned up).  Although sometimes seemingly tedious, “the procedural rules which have been fashioned from the generality of due process are our best instruments for the distillation and evaluation of essential facts from the conflicting welter of data that life and our adversary methods present.”  Id. 

For our public health, Congress and the Executive have built—over decades—an apparatus that marries the rigors of science with the execution and force of the United States government. One extraordinary product of that apparatus has been the eradication and reduction of certain communicable diseases through the development and use of vaccines.  In the words of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), “[v]accines are one of the greatest achievements of biomedical science and public health.”2  Since the rise of vaccine development and usage in the early- to mid-1900s, “[t]he United States of America [has been] one of the pioneering nations to conceptualize and implement a robust immunization system that helped the nation tackle major epidemics.”3 

Since its founding in 1964, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (“ACIP”) has aided this endeavor by providing expert guidance on the clinical use of vaccines.4  The Department of Health and Humans Services (“HHS”), which indirectly oversees ACIP, formalized ACIP’s non-partisan, science-backed nature through ACIP’s governance documents.5  And Congress has, in turn, recognized the importance and value of having such independent experts involved in setting our national public health agenda by cementing ACIP’s role in the CDC’s issuance of immunization schedules, which—among other things—determines which vaccines are available to patients through insurers and government healthcare programs.6  This is all to say that there is a method to how these decisions historically have been made—a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements. 

Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.  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.  Second, the Government removed all duly appointed members of ACIP and summarily replaced them without undertaking any of the rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades. Again, this procedural failure highlights the very reasons why procedures exist and raises a substantial likelihood that the newly appointed ACIP fails to comport with governing law. 

Today, faced with Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing that the reconstitution of ACIP and the January 2026 changes to the childhood immunization schedule violate the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”).  For the reasons stated below, the Court will grant Plaintiffs’ motion in part.  

Leftward Trend in Social Science Research?

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Manzi, J. The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024. Theor Soc 55, 25 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-026-09690-2

This study analyzes approximately 600,000 English-language social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024 to estimate the long-run ideological orientation of disciplinary research output. Large language models (LLMs) were applied to each abstract using a fixed 2025 U.S. ideological spectrum, enabling consistent coding across six decades. Five key findings emerged. First, roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024. Third, policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not. Fourth, disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity Fifth, sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time. Robustness checks using a wide assortment of alternative datasets and analytical methodologies indicated that these findings were unlikely to be artifacts of idiosyncratic assumptions. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the capacity of LLM-based text classification to deliver reliable, large-scale ideological measurement over time, a task previously impractical with human coding alone. Taken together, the analysis provides the first systematic, cross-disciplinary evidence of the long-run political orientation of anglophone social science scholarship, revealing both the persistence and the intensification of its leftward tendencies, particularly in sociocultural domains.

Huge caveat, from the article:In this study, ideology was operationalized as the relative positioning of a given text along a left–right spectrum of U.S. political thought. This includes economic and sociocultural dimensions, each characterized by their association with recognizable ideological actors and institutions. To ensure interpretive consistency over a 65-year period (1960 to 2024), political stance was evaluated against a fixed 2025 reference frame, derived from contemporary U.S. political categories.

This approach involved trade-offs. Using a static ideological scale, anchored to notions such as the 2025 political positions of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, or the Heritage Foundation, ensured that the LLM’s judgments were grounded in stable, well-defined anchor points. It avoided the problem of ideological drift, in which the meaning of ‘left’ or ‘right’ might evolve over time due to shifting partisan alignments or cultural contexts. However, this came at the cost of temporal anachronism. Texts written in earlier decades may have been judged by standards they would not have recognized.

There is no doubt that the academy leans left, and has done so for a long time.  But the core problem with Manzi's analysis is that the entire US political spectrum has moved to the left, especially on cultural issues.  On abortion, civil rights, marriage, gender equality and a range of other issues, positions that were once radical left (e.g., support for same-sex marriage) are now mainstream.  Judge Glock at National Affairs:

The interaction of politics, policy, and public opinion should change how we look at polarization. In one sense, some conservative Republicans have indeed moved away from what we now consider the center. But the center itself has also changed, and veered emphatically to the left. Both parties, to varying degrees, have followed this shift over time. The changing context helps explain why each party can see the other as "radical" relative to what it considers the center, and why the argument that the right has moved rightward more than the left has moved leftward is unpersuasive.

 

Fallen Idol: Cesar Chavez

Many posts have discussed Hispanic Americans.

Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes at NYT:

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.

Recently, more than 50 years later, Ms. Murguia learned that a street near her home in the Central California city of Bakersfield was in the process of being renamed. City officials want to name it in honor of her abuser.

Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, set off immediate reverberations and alarmed and disturbed his allies. Even before this article was published, upon learning of the reporters’ inquiries, the U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations.

Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas, both of whom are now 66, were the daughters of longtime organizers who had marched in rallies alongside Mr. Chavez. He used the privacy of his California office to frequently molest Ms. Murguia, she said. He had known her since she was 8 years old. She became so traumatized that she attempted to end her life multiple times by the age of 15.

Ms. Rojas said she was 12 when Mr. Chavez first touched her inappropriately, groping her breasts in the same office where he’d meet with Ms. Murguia. When Ms. Rojas was 15, he arranged to have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California, she said, and had sexual intercourse with her — rape, under state law, because she was not old enough to consent. (Ms. Murguia said Mr. Chavez molested her but never had intercourse with her.)

The abuse allegations appear to be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Chavez, much of which has never been publicly revealed. The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.

 

New:
Dolores Huerta writes lengthy statement following @nytimes investigation into Cesar Chavez.

Huerta says she had sexual encounters with Chavez resulting in 2 children.

“I have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farm worker movement…” pic.twitter.com/hdL5KnhSi9

— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) March 18, 2026

Polarized Views of Foreign Policy

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization.

From Gallup: 

US and Israel

Many posts have discussed relations between the US and Israel

Ben Kamisar at NBC:

American voters’ feelings on Israel and the Palestinian territories have shifted dramatically in recent years, in a sea change that is transforming the Democratic Party and shaping its primaries.

A new NBC News poll underscores the depths of the shift. More registered voters view Israel negatively than positively, a change from a few years ago. The change has been especially pronounced among independents and Democrats, fueling divided congressional primaries in 2026 and potentially shaping the party’s 2028 presidential contest.

 Ron Brownstein at Bloomberg:

Some conflict was inevitable between a US Democratic Party (and an American Jewish community) grounded in the left and an Israeli electorate that has mostly moved right since the 1990s. But Netanyahu has systematically widened that divide by consistently and almost exclusively cultivating the American right. “Netanyahu decided 20 years ago that evangelical Christians, conservative Jews and the Republicans were his natural constituency, and he’s given up. He doesn’t care about the rest,” says Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former top State Department adviser on the Middle East.

To win his first election as prime minister in 1996, Netanyahu recruited Arthur Finkelstein, a legendary strategist among the Republican far right. Once in office, Netanyahu commissioned a study by a group of US neoconservatives that urged both “a clean break” from the Palestinian peace process and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Netanyahu clashed so vehemently with Democratic President Bill Clinton over his push for a two-state peace agreement that Clinton famously left his first meeting with the Israeli leader angrily declaring “who’s the f---ing superpower here?”

Courts Checking POTUS

Many posts have discussed the independence of the judiciary.

Michael S. Schmidt and Alan Feuer:

A judge has thrown out two of their most high-profile indictments.

Grand juries have repeatedly refused to charge those they are targeting.

And now, in the wake of a lacerating ruling by a federal judge derailing an inquiry into the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, officials at the Justice Department have encountered an even more profound problem: Prosecutors are floundering in the most basic steps of criminal investigations into those President Trump wants scrutinized.

The latest setback in the president’s retribution campaign came on Friday when Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington quashed grand jury subpoenas to the central bank for information about the renovations underway at its headquarters and Mr. Powell’s testimony to Congress about them.

The U.S. attorney overseeing the case, Mr. Trump’s longtime friend and ally Jeanine Pirro, has vowed to appeal the decision and cast Judge Boasberg, who has clashed with the Trump administration, as an activist. And an appeals court could ultimately overturn the decision.

...

As a general rule, prosecutors are given great leeway in issuing grand jury subpoenas, a common tool in the early stages of investigations. Unlike search warrants, they do not require a finding of probable cause by a judge that there might be evidence a crime was committed.

But Judge Boasberg found that Ms. Pirro’s office did not even meet the extremely low threshold needed to send the subpoenas, ruling there was “essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime.”

...

Judge Boasberg explicitly acknowledged the reality of Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign, writing that the president had urged the Justice Department to investigate his adversaries and adding that the department’s prosecutors had listened. In and of itself, it was an extraordinary acknowledgment. Citing a Supreme Court case, he wrote that “judges ‘are not required to exhibit a naïveté from which ordinary citizens are free.’”

JUST IN: Trump unleashes two big rants against #SCOTUS & Boasberg, judge who blocked the Powell grand jury subpoena. Trump's deep-seated grudge against the justices is clear, particularly for not intervening in 2020 election pic.twitter.com/7d9rPknrmL

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) March 16, 2026

Policy Schools Are Short on Conservative Voices

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Frederick Hess at AEI:

It’d be good for everyone if there were a deeper bench of Republican policy professionals who really knew how government works. That’s why it’s such a big problem that the nation’s public policy schools serve as owned-and-operated subsidiaries of the Democratic Party.

Faculty at leading programs lean lopsidedly to the left; unsurprisingly, they emphasize predictable priorities, such as prison reform, homelessness, or healthcare. The technocratic progressives are joined by colleagues who go further still, recasting policy debates in identity-driven and baldly ideological terms to “expose” systemic racism and the evils of U.S. capitalism.

Right-leaning priorities are routinely marginalized or dismissed as backward-looking, as is the case with immigration enforcement, entitlement reform, educational choice, or tax-cutting. As a result of this bias, a broad swath of aspiring conservative policy professionals has sensibly opted to avoid these programs altogether. The result: Republicans are short on skilled policy professionals, while left-leaning students and scholars operate in a blue bubble in which they too rarely engage with those who think differently.