The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer recommend routine COVID-19 shots for healthy children and pregnant women, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a Tuesday morning post on X.
“Last year, the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot, despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children,” Kennedy said in a video, flanked by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Marty Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.
“It’s common sense, and it’s good science,” said Bhattacharya.
NIH typically is not involved in vaccine regulation. The FDA decides whether to approve a vaccine; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decides who should receive it.
But the CDC is currently without an acting director, and it appears Kennedy made the decision unilaterally.
The coronavirus has killed more than 1 million people in the past five years, and annual shots have served as a dose of protection. Yet fewer and fewer people have been getting them, and top administration officials argue there’s no benefit and even potential harm to individuals.
During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy assured lawmakers that he would not take away anyone’s vaccines. But removing the vaccine from CDC’s recommended list will have a similar impact.
The current recommendation from the CDC is for everyone six months and older, including pregnant women, to get COVID vaccines annually.
Axing the shot from the CDC’s list of routine vaccines will make it much more difficult for people who want the shot to get it. Insurance companies will no longer have to cover it, and government programs like Medicaid won’t either.
The change in CDC recommendation comes a week after Makary and the agency’s top vaccine regulator announced a plan to limit the approval of new COVID-19 vaccines to adults over 65 as well as people who are high risk.
New COVID vaccines intended for healthy children and adults will need to go through lengthy placebo-controlled clinical trials before they can get approved.
But it was not immediately clear what the recommendation against “healthy pregnant women” receiving the shot will mean, as Makary and HHS last week listed pregnancy as a risk factor for having complications from COVID-19.
Infectious disease experts have said they are worried this move is part of a larger trend of HHS pulling back from promoting and approving new vaccines.
Kennedy has a long history of opposition to a variety of vaccines, and petitioned the FDA in 2021 to revoke the emergency-use authorizations of the COVID vaccines. Makary and Bhattacharya are also prominent skeptics of the COVID shot and vaccine mandates.
Jerome Adams, a public health expert and former surgeon general from the first Trump administration, said Tuesday’s announcement was concerning, and was effectively a mandate against the vaccines for certain groups.
“Shifting from vaccine mandates to outright prohibitions does not reflect medical freedom; it represents a different form of government intervention, one that restricts individual choice and access to evidence-based care,” Adams wrote on X.
