Kennedy’s MAHA Allies Pressure CDC Over $1.55 Billion Covid Vaccine Buy
A new legal letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts the agency’s latest Covid vaccine procurement under sharp scrutiny.
The letter, dated June 16, was sent by Siri & Glimstad to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the CDC’s acting director. It was written on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), React19, and others.
The groups accuse CDC of agreeing to purchase $1.55 billion in pediatric and adult Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna while injured Americans still fight for recognition, treatment, and compensation.
The letter is not just a policy complaint. It is a warning shot.
It argues that the procurement raises “serious concern regarding a potential violation of federal law.” The firm also frames the decision as a moral failure by an agency now operating under Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose rise was powered in part by people who demanded more scrutiny of vaccine safety.
The Contracts
The letter identifies four CDC contracts tied to fiscal years 2026 and 2027. It says the agency agreed to buy $735.7 million in pediatric Pfizer Covid vaccines, $505.3 million in adult Pfizer vaccines, $29.2 million in adult Moderna vaccines, and $285 million in pediatric Moderna vaccines.
The timing matters.
On May 29, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided Covid vaccines for the 2026 and 2027 season should target a monovalent JN.1 lineage XFG variant. The agency, which regulates vaccine approval and advises manufacturers on updated formulas, said its advisory committee had reviewed variant circulation, vaccine effectiveness, immunogenicity data, and manufacturing timelines before FDA advised manufacturers on the updated formula.
That gives the government a standard procurement rationale. CDC can argue it is buying updated products for the next respiratory virus season.
But the letter argues that CDC has ignored the human side of that decision. It says the government is again sending large sums to manufacturers while people who report serious injuries after vaccination remain without meaningful federal support.
The Injury Question
The letter’s strongest language centers on people who say they were harmed by Covid vaccines, and on what the signatories see as CDC’s misguided priorities:
For the millions of Americans harmed by these products, this decision is deeply painful. Rather than directing resources towards treating those whose lives have been devastated, CDC has chosen to further enrich Pfizer and Moderna.
The signatories point to two groups. One is the “tens of thousands of individuals with serious injuries” who have contacted Siri & Glimstad, the law firm behind the letter and a major force in vaccine-injury and informed-consent litigation. The other is React19, a nonprofit advocacy and support group for people who report long-term injuries after Covid vaccination. According to the letter, React19 has more than 40,000 members.
The V-safe Dispute
The letter also invokes the CDC’s V-safe system, the smartphone-based monitoring program used during the Covid vaccine rollout.
Siri & Glimstad says CDC fought in court for more than two years to prevent public disclosure of V-safe data. The dispute began in June 2021, when ICAN sought the data under FOIA. It sued CDC in December 2021 and again in May 2022. The first major release came in October 2022, but the fight over the free-text entries continued into 2024.
The data, the letter says, were damning:
[It] showed that over 7% of the 10 million V-safe users reported needing medical care after a Covid vaccine, on average 2 to 3 times each, with over 70% of those medical encounters resulting in hospitalization, emergency room visits, or urgent care.
ICAN has long presented V-safe data as evidence that regulators minimized safety signals. Critics have argued that V-safe reports do not automatically prove causation. But the political question remains: Why did the public have to fight so hard to see the data?
The PREP Shield
The letter also points to the legal shield around Covid vaccines:
Those seriously injured by this product have been left without recourse because pharmaceutical companies have been granted complete immunity under the PREP Act[.]
In December 2024, outgoing HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra extended the Covid PREP Act declaration through December 31, 2029. That extension preserved liability protections for vaccine makers, distributors, program planners, pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, and other qualified persons involved in covered Covid countermeasures.
Kennedy has the power to revoke or narrow that protection, but so far, he has not.
That means Pfizer and Moderna remain largely protected from ordinary injury lawsuits tied to these products. Injured people are pushed instead into the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, which the letter shows is practically useless:
The Countermeasure Injury Compensation Program (CICP) remains woefully underfunded and structurally designed to deny compensation (only 0.39% [56 of 14,152] of COVID-related CICP claims have been compensated, with an average payout, excluding three outliers, of a miserly $5,052.57 per claimant) — leaving the injured with nowhere to turn.
Notably, Aaron Siri, the lawyer behind Siri & Glimstad, fights the administration in court over the CICP. In his latest legal update, he said the Justice Department continues to defend what he called the “blatantly unconstitutional ‘compensation’ program” for Covid vaccine injuries. He argued that it has “almost no funds, no process, and systematically denies almost all claims,” even as the government plans to send $1.5 billion to Pfizer and Moderna.
His conclusion was blunt: “Shameful.”
The ACIP Problem
The letter then raises a legal issue tied to the Vaccines for Children program, known as VFC.
The point is narrow, but serious. VFC does not operate as a blank federal pipeline for any pediatric vaccine the government buys. Under Section 1928 of the Social Security Act, the program relies on the vaccine list established and reviewed by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP.
That is where the contracts could become vulnerable.
The letter asks CDC to confirm that the Pfizer and Moderna contracts “were not in any manner related to the Vaccines for Children Program,” and that, without ACIP approval, the vaccines “will not be part of this program.”
The signatories make the warning explicit:
Absent approval from ACIP, the vaccines procured from Pfizer and Moderna pursuant to these contracts cannot be procured, distributed, or administered through the VFC, and any such conduct would be a clear violation of federal law.
The authors close the section with a litigation threat. They urge CDC to cancel the contracts because it would be “the moral, ethical, and compassionate thing to do.” But if the agency will not do that, they ask for immediate confirmation that the contracts do not violate the VFC statute.
The Allies Behind the Letter
The Informed Consent Action Network was founded in 2016 to defend informed consent and challenge federal health agencies through litigation. Its founder, Del Bigtree, is a prominent medical freedom activist and former communications director for Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Siri is also close to Kennedy’s world. In 2024, he was described as Kennedy’s personal attorney and a top ally involved in interviewing candidates for senior health jobs during the transition to President Donald Trump’s second administration. Siri has also filed vaccine-related petitions on ICAN’s behalf.
In other words, the three men were not merely aligned. They were closely connected inside Kennedy’s political and legal orbit. That is what gives the letter unusual force.
This is not a smear campaign from Kennedy’s traditional opponents. It comes from people who helped build the movement that now, at last, has representation inside the federal government. That movement demanded a break from the old Covid vaccine regime. It expected a public accounting that took vaccine-injured Americans seriously.
Instead, the Kennedy-led health bureaucracy is signing billion-dollar contracts with Pfizer and Moderna for products that have killed or injured millions of Americans.
The episode is another reminder that the federal government has no constitutional authority to manage healthcare. As this magazine has long argued, that power must be returned to the states, local communities, and families currently forced to live with the consequences of harmful federal policies that are in major part shaped by the pharmaceutical lobby.
