RFK Jr. eyes reversing CDC's Covid-19 vaccine recommendation for children

Source: Politico

04/22/2025 04:02 PM EDT


HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is weighing pulling the Covid-19 vaccine from the government’s list of recommended immunizations for children, two people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.

The directive under consideration would remove the Covid shot from the childhood vaccine schedule maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and widely used by physicians to guide vaccine distribution, marking Kennedy’s most significant move yet to shake up the nation’s vaccination practices. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has previously questioned the need for kids to get the shot, raising doubts about its safety and citing studies showing healthy children face an extremely low risk of death from Covid.

Eliminating the vaccine from the CDC schedule would not bar kids from receiving it. But the change would represent an extraordinary intervention by Kennedy to override the agency’s scientific decision-making and reverse a recommendation backed by the CDC and a slate of independent advisers just three years ago.

The removal would also likely influence vaccination procedures across the nation. Pediatricians rely on the CDC schedule to determine which vaccines they should give children and when to administer them, in order to protect against a range of common infectious diseases.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/22/trump-pull-covid-vaccine-recommendation-children-00304091

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The reason why emphasis began to be put on adolescents, children, and infants for a COVID vaccine, was because it was found that when the Omicron variant hit, it was impacting those age groups HARD with respect to hospitalizations and deaths, compared to the earlier variants. Of course older adults were and still are, the most vulnerable.





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