COVID vaccines are no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, Kennedy says
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday announced that COVID-19 vaccines are no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women — a move immediately questioned by several public health experts.
In a 58-second video posted on the social media site X, Kennedy said he removed COVID-19 shots from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations for those groups. No one from the CDC was in the video, and CDC officials referred questions about the announcement to Kennedy and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
No other details were released, and HHS officials did not immediately respond to questions about how the decision was made.
“There’s no new data or information, just them flying by the seat of their pants,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
U.S. health officials, following recommendations by infectious disease experts, have been urging annual COVID-19 boosters for all Americans ages 6 months and older.
The idea of changing the recommendations is not completely out of the blue. As the COVID-19 pandemic has waned, experts have increasingly discussed the possibility of focusing vaccination efforts on people 65 and older — who are among those most as risk for death and hospitalization.
A CDC advisory panel is set to meet in June to make recommendations about the fall shots. Among its options are suggesting shots for high-risk groups but still giving lower-risk people the choice to get vaccinated.
But Kennedy, a leading anti-vaccine advocate before becoming health secretary, decided not to wait for the scientific panel’s review. He said that annual COVID-19 booster shots have been recommended for kids “despite the lack of any clinical data” to support that decision.
Some physicians and public health leaders expressed concern that HHS officials disregarded a scientific review process that has been in place for decades, in which experts — in public meetings — review current medical evidence and hash out the pros and cons of policy changes.
“It’s a dangerous precedent. If you can start doing that with this vaccine, you can start doing that with any vaccine you want — including mumps-measles-rubella,” said Osterholm, referring to another vaccine that Kennedy has voiced doubts about.
He and others said the announcement raises an array of questions, including whether health insurance companies will keep covering COVID-19 vaccinations and how hard it will be now for people who want the shots to get them.
“The reason we give vaccines to healthy people is to keep them safe,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
More than 1.2 million people have died in the U.S. from COVID-19, most of them elderly. But children haven’t been spared: The coronavirus has been the underlying cause in more than 1,300 childhood deaths since the pandemic began, according to CDC data.
