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Under the leadership of HHS secretary and longtime vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Trump administration has in recent weeks begun attempting to restrict access to COVID vaccines. On Tuesday, RFK Jr. announced that the CDC would no longer recommend COVID vaccination for healthy children and pregnant women. Though the CDC’s subsequent policy updates didn’t go quite that far, the moves have prompted significant pushback and concerns from infectious disease experts and others in the medical community. Below is a look at some of the biggest questions about these new policies and what they’ll mean for Americans.
What’s the CDC’s new guidance on COVID vaccines for kids and pregnant women?
On May 29, the Centers for Disease Control updated its childhood immunization schedule to say that healthy kids between the ages of 6 months and 17 years “may receive” COVID vaccines “informed by the clinical judgment of a healthcare provider and personal preference and circumstances.” The agency previously recommended all children be vaccinated. Now it just says they may be vaccinated, provided their parents’ decision is made in consultation with a healthcare provider. The CDC still broadly recommends vaccination for immunocompromised children who are at higher risk of severe COVID.
The agency has also removed its recommendation that all pregnant adults receive the COVID vaccine, but offered no additional information. Now the schedule just says “No Guidance/Not Applicable” for that group. As CBS News points out, “several pages of agency guidance saying that pregnant women are recommended to get vaccinated because of their higher risk of severe disease remain on the CDC’s website as of Friday.”
How did the CDC come to this conclusion?
That’s not clear. This was not the normal transparent and public process for the CDC to update its vaccine recommendations. The agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) wasn’t involved in the new recommendation, the CDC provided no scientific basis for the changes, and the agency currently has no known acting director to sign off on the plan. It’s not even clear who at the agency updated the vaccine schedule.
What did RFK Jr. announce and did the CDC contradict him?
Sort of. In a short video he shared on X on May 27, Kennedy announced that he had unilaterally decided that COVID vaccines would be removed from the CDC’s immunization schedule for healthy children and pregnant women. He cited no evidence to back the decision.
Today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from @CDCgov recommended immunization schedule. Bottom line: it’s common sense and it’s good science. We are now one step closer to realizing @POTUS’s promise to Make America Healthy Again. pic.twitter.com/Ytch2afCLP
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) May 27, 2025
Two days later, the CDC did remove those broad recommendations, but it also kept COVID shots for healthy kids on the schedule, provided a doctor or medical provider was consulted first. COVID vaccines are now categorized as “recommended vaccination based on shared clinical decision-making.”
According to the Washington Post, RFK Jr’s announcement blindsided and confused CDC officials, as did the memo which followed:
Five hours later, CDC officials received a one-page “secretarial directive,” dated May 19 and signed by Kennedy, that contradicts some of what he said in his video, according to two current and one former health officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. …
In his video, Kennedy also said federal health officials had removed the previous recommendations from the agency website. But top CDC officials did not know of the decision at the time, according to one official, and as of Wednesday that removal still had not happened for the millions of people who rely on the site for health-care guidance.
The directive raises questions about who should be getting the vaccine because it refers to both healthy children and all children. “The CDC is directed to remove COVID-19 vaccines from the recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule by Age and recommended vaccines during pregnancy,” the letter states.
On Friday, the HHS’s X account insisted that the CDC hadn’t contradicted Kennedy:
The COVID-19 vaccine schedule is very clear. The vaccine is not recommended for pregnant women. The vaccine is not recommended for healthy children. Any decision by a parent to vaccinate their child outside the CDC recommended schedule should be made in consultation with their healthcare provider.
Can RFK Jr. just rewrite vaccine policies by himself?
Yes, it’s likely legal for Kennedy to implement his own vaccine recommendations as HHS secretary, but it’s also the first time an HHS secretary has ever tried something like this. In addition, the new policies may face lawsuits because they didn’t follow standard procedure. Reports STAT News’ Helen Branswell:
It is extraordinary that a health secretary would remove vaccines from a CDC vaccination schedule without undergoing a consultation process, and without asking the advice of the ACIP, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at UC Law San Francisco who follows vaccination policy closely.
“There is a process and it hasn’t been followed,” Reiss told STAT in an interview. She suggested the lack of process could make the decision vulnerable to being overturned, if it is challenged in court, a view shared by Richard Hughes, an expert on vaccines policy law at the firm Epstein Becker Green. A court would demand that such a change in policy was the result of a deliberative process, Reiss said.
“Administrative decisions actually have to be made on the basis of something, not just because the agency feels like it,” Reiss said. “A one-minute video on Twitter is not a thorough explanation.”
Kathryn Edwards, a vaccines expert who is a former member of the ACIP and a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, was also critical of Kennedy’s move. “He’s overstepped his bounds,” she said.
Will private insurers and Medicaid still cover COVID vaccines under the new guidelines?
For children, yes, the CDC’s “shared decision-making” guidance preserves the status quo in which Medicaid and U.S. health insurance companies are legally required to pay for the COVID vaccines. That also means the vaccines will remain available to low-income kids through the federal Vaccines for Children program.
However, it’s not clear if insurance companies will still cover vaccines for pregnant women sans the official CDC recommendation. As the 19th reports, insurers may opt to continue to provide coverage of COVID vaccines during pregnancy to prevent a serious and more costly illness, even if they are not legally mandated to do that.
If insurance companies did stop providing coverage for COVID vaccines, a single series or booster could cost someone hundreds of dollars out of pocket per dose.
Is there solid scientific evidence to back up these decisions?
Physician Dhruv Khullar writes at the New Yorker that while there are good reasons to reevaluate current COVID vaccine recommendations, Kennedy’s approach is in no way based on good science:
Not all vaccines should be recommended for all people. Many countries, including France and the United Kingdom, endorse COVID vaccines only for older individuals and those at high risk for severe cases of the disease. More studies are needed in order to evaluate how much a healthy person benefits from ongoing COVID booster shots if she’s already been infected and/or immunized. Nonetheless, we should not be pleased with Kennedy’s machinations. According to data from the C.D.C., infants under six months of age with COVID have been hospitalized at comparable rates to people in their late sixties and early seventies. Many infants who experience severe illness have no known underlying medical conditions; most are born to mothers who haven’t been vaccinated during pregnancy, and are therefore less able to pass on protective antibodies. (Relatively few older children develop severe COVID.) Meanwhile, pregnant and postpartum women face clear dangers after a coronavirus infection, including blood clots, hemorrhage, and perilously high blood pressure. For this reason, the C.D.C. has considered pregnancy a high-risk condition warranting immunization. …
The problem with Kennedy’s decision is that it seems to have been his decision, not the decision of deliberative medical authorities. If such an announcement were to come from independent scientists who review data and debate trade-offs, it might have been justifiable. Indeed, if it had stemmed from leaders who did not have a history of vaccine skepticism and a disregard for standard procedure, perhaps we wouldn’t even be discussing it. But this asymmetry is not a sign that we are unfairly blaming the messenger. It is a reminder that science is about more than the right answer, when such a thing exists. Science is a process, and if we follow its procedures with care we can get closer to the truth.
At the Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu emphasized how “kids are at risk from the virus, and a safe shot can lower that risk”:
From the earliest days of the pandemic, children have been afflicted by severe COVID at lower rates than adults. “We certainly did not see as much pediatric disease as we saw adult disease,” Buddy Creech, a pediatrician and the director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program, told me. But kids also were not spared the virus’s worst effects. After the pandemic began, the virus became a top-10 cause of death among American minors, and it has killed more than 1,000 children, many of whom had no preexisting health conditions.
Kids, like adults, are also vulnerable to long COVID, albeit at lower rates. And they have experienced their own unusual, terrifying manifestations of disease, including the inflammatory condition MIS-C. (MIS-C has become much less common in recent years, but is poorly understood and could return with future variants, Creech told me.) Disease that manifests rather mildly now may change as the virus continues to evolve. And generally speaking, among kids, “the younger the child, the higher the risk for severe disease,” Sallie Permar, the chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me.
Yesterday, at the press briefing, Prasad noted that COVID hospitalizes children far less often than it does older adults. But diseases also don’t have to be catastrophically deadly to warrant a childhood-vaccination policy, Ofer Levy, the director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. The death rate for chicken pox, for instance, is extremely low, but the vaccine is available to, and recommended for, all children—not just those with preexisting conditions. And COVID vaccines for kids, especially in the smaller doses tailored to the youngest age groups, are “among the safest we know of,” Permar told me. Although myocarditis is a rare side effect of COVID vaccines, it is primarily a concern for adolescent boys and young men, rather than very young kids; in general, the shots’ side effects include redness at the injection site, soreness, and fever.
Are Kennedy and his cohort practicing what they once preached against?
STAT News’s Mathew Herper argues that RFK Jr. and others have become the same types of public health officials they raged against not that long ago:
[Kennedy’s decision to stop recommending COVID shots] represents a bulldozing of safeguards intended to keep public health officials honest and their decisions transparent. It also tramples on individuals’ ability to make their own decisions about medical evidence.
The decision is deeply and maddeningly ironic, because Kennedy and other top figures in the Department of Health and Human Services are shaped by grievances about how their predecessors behaved during the Covid pandemic. At the time, they railed against decisions that they said were made without medical evidence or the consultation of important experts. Yet Tuesday’s decision to change the CDC vaccine recommendations, as well as new policy made last week about the way Covid shots would be regulated, takes these mistakes and amplifies them.
Instead of slowing medicine’s pendulum so that it might eventually stop at a point of truth, Kennedy, the health secretary, is now swinging it so wildly that patients and doctors can do nothing but cover their heads and duck as medicine becomes more and more vulnerable to politicized extremes.
Why is this all so confusing?
It’s a good question. Some fear that the confusion could be intentional. It’s also possible that, as in other parts of the Trump administration, various decision-makers are not fully aligned, and/or they are making it up as they go and/or moving too fast.
