Some experts are concerned and others are unsure about the policy’s specifics because US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reversed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation in a one-minute video.
Kennedy was joined in the video, posted on May 27 on X, by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.
Kennedy, who was chosen by President Donald Trump after a years-long embrace of vaccine conspiracy theories, did not specify whether he was speaking to recommend that pregnant women get their first booster shots, or both. No clarity was provided on the HHS website, which stated that “everyone 6 months and older can get COVID-19 vaccines.” Getting vaccinated is the best way to help protect people from COVID-19″. A similar broad vaccine endorsement was provided on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage from January 7 before Kennedy became secretary.
Some experts believe that tightening the federal vaccine recommendation is due to the low rates of serious COVID-19 cases in children. Others say that the move will make it harder to get vaccinated and cause preventable serious illnesses.
Kennedy broke the law by refusing to hold a scheduled meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to vote on vaccine guidance.
If insurers choose not to cover COVID-19 shots for those groups, suggesting against vaccination for some groups might make it more difficult for most children and pregnant women to get the shot. Immunization rates are already low, with 13 percent of children and 14.4 percent of pregnant women up to date with the 2024-25 edition of the COVID-19 vaccine, the CDC found in late April.
Health experts and three federal health officials’ statements were fact-checked by us.
Kennedy claimed that vaccine boosters for children lacked clinical information.
Kennedy said, “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”.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group of outside experts who advise the CDC on when and how frequently to immunize healthy children who have already received COVID-19 vaccines, has recommended annual boosters in recent years.
According to Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the committee made this recommendation without also recommending that the vaccine go through new rounds of clinical trials each year before being used. (The vaccine had been approved by the FDA for safety and efficacy early in the pandemic.) According to Schaffner, a former committee member and current adviser, the panel came to the conclusion that the coronavirus vaccine operated similarly to the annual flu vaccine, which didn’t require repeated clinical trials.
The American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics both recommended COVID-19 vaccinations for children, but they did not demand any new clinical trials.
Kids generally don’t need the vaccination, FDA chief said
According to Makary, “Healthy kids don’t need” the vaccine.
This dispute persists. Most children will not face serious illness from COVID-19, but a small fraction will. Given this level of risk, experts have various opinions on how widespread the vaccination program is.
Children and adolescents 17 and younger made up about 4% of COVID-19-associated hospitalizations during the COVID-19 season in the years 2024 to 2025. The relatively small number of serious cases among children has driven the belief among some scientists that the universal vaccination recommendation is too broad.
Infants under six months old were the youngest among all children, with the highest rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations.
According to Schaffner, who cited a September 2024 , article , on the CDC’s website, “With 4 million new children born every year without being exposed to COVID, young children have rates of disease comparable to those of people over 65.”
COVID-19 was among the top 10 causes of death in children during the worst of the pandemic between 2020 and 2022, said Tara C Smith, a Kent State University epidemiologist. Why don’t we continue to vaccinate for COVID even though we may no longer be at that stage?
Some doctors are concerned about the persistent condition known as long COVID, which is more well known, particularly in children.
The outside advisory committees and the medical academies found this level of serious disease to be sufficient to recommend continued annual vaccinations.
According to Makary, this strategy is comparable to that in other nations.
Makary was accurate when he claimed that “most nations have stopped recommending” routine COVID-19 vaccination for children.
“Many countries will only offer the COVID vaccine to children if they have underlying health conditions or are immunocompromised”, said Brooke Nichols, a Boston University associate professor of global health.
A list of booster recommendations from Canada, Europe, and Australia was included in Makary’s May 20 article. In the majority of nations, it was said that the advice was to vaccine older people or those who were at high risk.
Most countries have taken this course, Schaffner said, because “by now, 95 percent of us have had experience with COVID, either through the vaccine or through illness or both. Second, it is believed that the current variants are much milder than some of the earlier ones.
The World Health Organization, in its 2024 report, recommended the COVID-19 vaccine for children who had never been immunized. For children and adolescents who had previously been vaccinated, it did not routinely recommend revaccination.
The European Medicines Agency, which received the vaccine, made a recommendation for children over the age of five and said it was safe and effective. According to Euronews, the organization made its recommendation in November 2021 and later made it a recommendation for the vaccination of children between the ages of 12 and 17?
In the United Kingdom, “only older people or those with specific diseases or illnesses making them susceptible to severe COVID were recommended to get boosters, and as a result, uptake in those groups was actually higher than in the US”, where outreach and advertising for the vaccinations focused on children as well as older people, said Babak Javid, an associate professor in the division of experimental medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.
The New York Times discovered that “many countries in Europe do not recommend the shots for healthy children under five, but the shots are approved for everyone who is at least six months old.”
According to doctors, the vaccine helps to protect expecting mothers.
Experts disagreed with Kennedy’s recommendation against vaccinating pregnant women, saying the vaccine protects pregnant women and their infants.
The president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Steven J. Fleischman, stated, “It is very clear that a pregnancy can lead to a catastrophic disability and severe family consequences. Growing evidence suggests that the infant is best protected after birth when the majority of hospitalized infants born to unvaccinated mothers are less than six months old.
After a vaccination, antibodies reach the fetus. Although there may be fever or pain at the injection site, the doctors’ group asserted that there is no conclusive evidence that the vaccine has any negative effects on the mother or the fetus.
In May, the federal government released contradictory information about pregnancy and the vaccine.
In Makary’s May 20 , article, he and his co-author included pregnancy on the CDC’s 2025 list of underlying medical conditions that increase the risk of severe COVID-19.
According to Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, “they literally contradicted themselves over the course of a few days.” “It appears that RFK Jr. reversed the decision of his own FDA.”
Following the May 27 video announcement, Makary , told NBC , that the decision about vaccination should be between a pregnant woman and her doctor.
A review of 67 studies conducted in 2024 found that pregnant women who had been fully immunized had a 61% lower chance of contracting COVID-19 while pregnant.
What comes next?
In its June meeting, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices might move towards less sweeping recommendations for vaccinating children, closer to those that Kennedy enacted.
The discussions in the most recent previous meeting, according to Schaffner, appeared to be moving in a more targeted direction.
According to Schaffner, the advisory committees may suggest more flexibility with vaccine usage than Kennedy’s video statement suggests when it comes to pregnant women.
Other areas where the panels could back greater flexibility could be for otherwise healthy people who serve as caregivers or who live with more vulnerable people who are advanced in age or are immunocompromised.
