Bloomberg Politics reports that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a network of personal injury lawyers are pressing a legal campaign against Merck's Gardasil vaccine, accusing the company of 'disease mongering' to inflate sales — a charge that runs directly against decades of mainstream medical consensus on the vaccine's safety and efficacy.
The strategic read: this isn't primarily a tort story. It's an executive-branch play. Kennedy now controls public health infrastructure. Personal injury litigation that once faced an uphill regulatory environment can now proceed in a climate shaped by the very official who built the case against the product.
Who benefits: the plaintiff's bar funding this effort, and an HHS leadership that has spent years treating vaccine approval as a political grievance rather than a public-health process. The constitutional concern is downstream: when a Cabinet officer's ideological priors reshape the regulatory record, every future safety determination at FDA is compromised before it begins.