Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he would remove the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s recommendation for children and healthy pregnant women to get vaccinated for COVID-19.
“I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that, as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule,” Kennedy said in a video attached to his post.
However, as of Tuesday morning, the CDC had so far not updated the immunization schedule to reflect the removal announced by Kennedy.
Kennedy’s move, announced Tuesday on X, appears to effectively shortcut a process set up by the agency’s outside advisers to discuss and make changes to the CDC’s influential vaccination guidance, which is directly tied to what insurers are required to cover and liability protections.
Those advisers had already been weighing whether and how to narrow the agency’s COVID-19 vaccine recommendations to only older adults and other people with an underlying condition that put them at risk of more severe illness from COVID-19.
Kennedy’s announcement also goes further than the advisory panel, which had been weighing including pregnant women as among those who would remain eligible for COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, given their increased risk of severe disease and the fact that it could also help provide some protection to their newborns.
The move also puts Kennedy at odds with his new officials at the Food and Drug Administration, who recently said pregnancy was among the underlying conditions that warranted continued eligibility for COVID-19 vaccine approvals.
It is not clear why Kennedy chose to announce the decision without waiting for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to complete its deliberations. The panel had been expected to vote on the issue at the routinely scheduled June meeting hosted by the agency.
“With the COVID-19 pandemic behind us, it is time to move forward. HHS and the CDC remain committed to gold standard science and to ensuring the health and well-being of all Americans — especially our nation’s children — using common sense,” Vianca N. Rodriguez Feliciano, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email.
Kennedy has also stalled other overdue recommendations from the panel for respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, vaccines and meningococcal vaccines.
The committee had voted on updated recommendations for those vaccines in April. Usually it is up to the CDC director to approve the recommendations. But it has been up to Kennedy to decide whether to adopt the new guidance, since the Trump administration has not appointed an acting CDC director to replace Susan Monarez, who stepped aside from that role while she goes through the nomination process for CDC director.
Only one recommendation from the April meeting, an update to restrict use of a Chikungunya vaccine linked to potentially severe side effects, has been greenlighted by Kennedy.
HHS has not responded to requests for comment on why the other recommendations have been delayed.
