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Connecticut Attorney General William Tong has joined 22 other attorneys general and Pennsylvania’s governor in a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. demanding that federal vaccine recommendations remain locked in place. The September 19 letter, released with a September 24 press statement from Tong’s office, responds to an HHS request for information on recommendation categories and shared clinical decision-making.
Tong’s accompanying quote captures the tone: “Vaccines save lives. MAHA memes are not a reliable or safe source of medical information. I urge Trump and RFK Jr. to respect the science and stop playing politics with our children’s lives. Too many children have died already from their reckless and foolish policy-by-conspiracy-theory.”
Note that neither the letter nor the press release provides any evidence to support the claim that "children have died" as a result of MAHA policies.
The letter itself is more bureaucratic. It tells Kennedy to examine HHS’s own “role in undermining public trust,” preserve the old Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) as the sole authority, keep most vaccines labeled “routine,” and treat shared clinical decision-making as a narrow exception that should not be expanded. It specifically objects to moving the hepatitis B birth dose and several other childhood shots toward individual conversations between parents and doctors. The coalition warns that anything short of the prior one-size-fits-all schedule will lower uptake and leave people “vulnerable to preventable disease.”
Tong and his colleagues frame any scrutiny of the childhood schedule as an attack on science. They treat questions about cumulative dosing, timing, ingredients, and individual risk-benefit as illegitimate. They treat parents who decline shots after reviewing package inserts, VAERS reports, or international schedules as victims of “memes.”
Shared clinical decision-making is not a conspiracy. It is the normal standard for medical interventions when benefits and risks vary by patient. A healthy infant born to a hepatitis B-negative mother faces a very small risk of infection in the United States. A one-size-fits-all birth-dose recommendation treats that infant the same as a baby born to a chronically infected mother. Parents who notice and ask whether the shot is necessary at 12 hours of life are not anti-science. They are doing what informed parents should do with every single medical product offered to their children.
Many developed countries recommend fewer routine childhood vaccines and fewer total doses than the United States did in 2024, yet they do not experience the devastating collapse of public health that Tong predicts. Families who compare those schedules, or who simply want more time between shots, or who prefer to space combination products, are exercising caution. Labeling a family's personal decision “policy-by-conspiracy-theory” is simply a way to shut down the conversation rather than win it.
It's similar to what happened when Connecticut eliminated the religious exemption to school vaccine requirements in 2021, and later passed legislation designed to undermine the remaining legal challenges. Tong celebrated the latest court dismissal of that challenge with the same slogan: “Vaccines save lives.” Families were told the state’s police power outweighed their personal religious beliefs. Now Tong objects when the federal government proposes giving more families a structured conversation with their own doctors instead of issuing a mandate. Ultimately, it's about control.
HHS under Kennedy has not banned vaccines. It has not pulled products from the market. It has simply asked whether the evidence supports the current recommendations, whether ACIP’s prior composition produced reliable risk-benefit analysis, and whether a revived Task Force for Safer Childhood Vaccines can contribute additional scrutiny.
The coalition letter comes as Tong continues challenging the Trump Administration’s changes to federal vaccine policy. In February 2026, Tong joined a multistate lawsuit challenging the administration’s overhaul of the childhood immunization schedule. This month, a federal judge ruled that the coalition has standing to challenge the CDC’s changes to the childhood immunization schedule.
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