The lead lawyer in a lawsuit against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over recent changes to COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant women previously worked for Moderna and Merck.
Richard Henry Hughes IV was vice president of public policy at Moderna from 2020-2022, when the vaccine maker developed and marketed the Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, which has netted the company billions of dollars over the last four years.
Before winning approval of its COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna had never successfully brought a product to market. Investigative journalist Whitney Webb reported that without that authorization and the subsequent approval of the vaccine and boosters, Moderna would have likely crumbled.
Hughes guided Moderna’s policy from the time it won initial emergency use authorization for its mRNA vaccine through the shot’s full approval in 2022.
Now, he’s representing plaintiffs like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in a lawsuit that seeks to restore COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and children — a move that likely would result in more sales and profits for Moderna and other COVID-19 vaccine makers.
In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for children on the Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule.
The update followed an announcement by Kennedy that the COVID-19 vaccine would no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant women. The announcement sparked confusion, as the changes weren’t yet visible on the CDC website.
The agency subsequently changed what previously was a universal recommendation that all children ages 6 months and older receive the COVID-19 shots, to a recommendation of “shared clinical decision-making” between parents and providers for children ages 6 months to 17 years who are not moderately immunocompromised.
On Monday, Hughes said at a news conference that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Kennedy are “asking the court to order the secretary to announce on X that those immunization recommendations are now reinstated to the CDC immunization schedules.”
The plaintiffs also seek an injunction against the directive that triggered the changes in recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines.
In addition to the AAP, original plaintiffs in the suit include the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Massachusetts Public Health Association, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and a physician named in the complaint as “Jane Doe,” who is 20 weeks pregnant and allegedly faces “barriers to access to the vaccine.”
The Infectious Diseases Society of America announced Tuesday that it had also joined the lawsuit.
A long career of serving Big Pharma
Since leaving Moderna, Hughes has been a partner at Epstein Becker Green, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, where he builds “comprehensive market strategies” for life science companies to support their product development and growth.
His career has been dedicated to counseling biopharmaceutical companies, investors and industry trade associations.
He is a member of the board of directors of Vaccinate Your Family, a vaccine advocacy group funded by vaccine makers AstraZeneca, CLS Seqirus, Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax, Merck, Sanofi, and the CDC.
Hughes teaches vaccine law at George Washington University. Before joining Moderna, he was vice president at Avalere Health, a healthcare industry consulting firm.
He was also the region policy executive at Merck from 2010-2014.
Merck is the maker of the Gardasil vaccine, first licensed in 2006. The product is designed to protect against human papillomavirus (HPV). In 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new version of that vaccine, the nine-valent Gardasil, which effectively drove GSK’s bivalent Cervarix HPV vaccine from the U.S. market.
Hughes recently criticized the new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC on vaccine recommendations.
Hughes’ criticism focused largely on Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., whom he accused of having a conflict of interest. He cited Kulldorff’s “adverse position to a major vaccine manufacturer,” demonstrated by his expert witness testimony in a lawsuit against Merck for allegedly misleading consumers about the safety of its Gardasil vaccine.
Hughes told The New York Times that Kennedy has been on a “decades-long mission” to undermine vaccines and to portray them as more dangerous than the illnesses they are designed to prevent.
“The secretary’s intentions are clear,” Hughes said. “He aims to destroy vaccines.”
Hughes has also said there has been a “weaponization of the courts against vaccines.”
The lawsuit against Kennedy and other public health officials and agencies seeks to use the courts to reverse the vaccine policy set by the public health agencies under Kennedy’s leadership.
According to the Times, the lawsuit focuses only on the COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, but more vaccine decisions may be added.
A correction to the Times’ article about the lawsuit indicated that Hughes mischaracterized the complaint made by Jane Doe in the lawsuit. He told the Times she was denied a vaccine, but the complaint indicates that she only feared she might not be able to get one.
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Many of the organizations that are plaintiffs in the lawsuit are themselves funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Some also received millions of dollars from the CDC to promote the COVID-19 shots.
The AAP, for instance, lists pharma giants Merck, Sanofi and COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna among its donors.
Last month, two of the plaintiffs — the AAP and the American College of Physicians — signed on to the “Vaccine Integrity Project,” a new initiative seeking to bypass public health authorities through the creation of “a nongovernmental vaccine system” for vaccine recommendations and purchasing.
The group is funded by iAlumbra, a nonprofit founded by Walmart heiress and billionaire philanthropist Christy Walton, known for her anti-Trump advocacy.
Related articles in The Defender
- Breaking: CDC Removes COVID Vaccine Recommendation for Healthy Kids, Healthy Pregnant Women
- The Real Agenda Behind American Academy of Pediatrics: Weaponizing Children’s Mental Health and Vaccines for Profit
- RFK Jr. Hit With Lawsuit Over Changes to COVID Vaccine Policies for Kids, Pregnant Women
- Part 1: Moderna Had a Long History of Failure. Then Along Came COVID.
