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For almost a decade, ICAN has been asking the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) about its legal obligations to maintain a task force on safer childhood vaccines and submit bi-annual reports to Congress. ICAN is thrilled to report that this task force has finally been reinstated under the leadership of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
When Congress eliminated pharmaceutical companies’ liability for vaccines in 1986, it made HHS responsible for vaccine safety. To assure HHS is actually performing this critical duty of assuring the safety of products injected into babies, the same 1986 law created a task force on safer childhood vaccines. This task force was supposed to make recommendations to the Secretary of HHS on how to make vaccines safer and the Secretary, in turn, was required to file a report with Congress every two years detailing efforts to improve vaccine safety.
As many of you know, ICAN previously sued HHS to obtain these reports that were supposed to be sent to Congress—and HHS, in response, admitted in 2018 that it never once filed a single required report. It also admitted that the task force had been disbanded in 1998! We checked again in 2023, and HHS stated it still hadn’t filed any reports.
On August 14, 2025, HHS announced it would finally reinstate the task force. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya will lead the task force and stated that it will reaffirm HHS’s “commitment to rigorous science, continuous improvement, and the trust of American families.”
ICAN congratulates Secretary Kennedy and Director Bhattacharya on this historic, long-overdue step.
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