Kennedy, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, was listed on court documents as one of the trial lawyers for the Children’s Health Defense group, which he spearheaded nearly a decade ago.

Todd Richardson, another one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, criticized Justice Elena Kagan after she blocked the appeal.

“Unfortunately, Justice Kagan did not choose to confer w/ the other justices and denied our application for an injunction,” he said in a post to X on Thursday.

Richardson said the plaintiffs, two doctors from Washington, had faced prosecution after “writing opinion articles in which they did not endorse the official covid narrative and offered their opinions about effective medical treatment and prevention.”

“We hope that one day the Supreme Court will clearly state that the Constitution does not permit the government to sanction the public viewpoint speech of physicians,” Rick Jaffe, an additional lawyer for the plaintiffs, posted on X.

The Children’s Health Defense organization was formerly known as the World Mercury Project before Kennedy renamed it in 2018. The nonprofit group’s stated mission is to end childhood health epidemics by “eliminating toxic exposure.” The group has a long history of advocating medical freedom, arguing that physicians’ ability to question vaccine safety is a protected constitutional right.

Children’s Health Defense’s battle with the courts began in August 2022, when a Washington state agency charged two physicians with unprofessional conduct for spreading what they described as “COVID misinformation” in newspaper opinion columns and other online platforms.

The Washington Medical Commission’s investigation came after Thomas Siler and Richard Eggleston questioned the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines and suggested COVID-19 tests were inaccurate. They also praised alternative treatments for the virus such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

The Children’s Health Defense group helped the doctors take their case to court in March in an effort to keep the commission from enforcing its unprofessional conduct regulations. The physicians argued that their views constituted rights to free speech protected under the First Amendment.

After Kagan rejected their appeal on Wednesday, the plaintiffs’ lawyers held out hope that the Supreme Court would still eventually take up their plea and protect the physicians’ public positions on COVID-19 and vaccines as the case remains pending in a federal appeals court.

Critics have labeled Kennedy and his Children’s Health Defense organization as “anti-vaccine” for years, with his stances on COVID-19 and other health matters coming under a microscope as he heads for a likely rough Senate confirmation vote to become the country’s next HHS secretary. However, Trump’s Cabinet nominee has argued that he is merely in favor of making sure vaccines are safe. He has often expressed concern about a 1986 law that made vaccine manufacturers immune from any financial liabilities, meaning people cannot sue the companies in question for harm that results from inoculation.

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The longtime health advocate, who has noted he is vaccinated, has said he wants to conduct vaccine safety studies and investigate federal data on vaccine efficacy because he believes vaccines should be tested “like other medicines.”

“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away,” he said during an interview with NBC interview in November. “People ought to have a choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information.”