CDC will no longer recommend COVID vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women

Aubrey Whelan, The Philadelphia Inquirer on May 27, 2025

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer include COVID vaccines on its recommended schedule of immunizations for “healthy children and healthy pregnant women,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a video statement posted to X on Tuesday.

Food and Drugs Commissioner Marty Makary said that there was “no evidence” that “healthy children” need the COVID vaccine.

But Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, said that COVID remains dangerous for both groups.

“It’s an uninformed decision. RFK Jr. said he would not take away anyone’s vaccines. He lied: That’s exactly what he’s doing," Offit said. Kennedy for decades has engaged in advocacy against vaccines, spreading misinformation that measles vaccines cause autism.

The new recommendation for COVID vaccines comes a week after Makary wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that the FDA will not license new COVID vaccines for healthy Americans under the age of 65 without additional clinical trials.

People over 65 or who have conditions that put them at risk for severe COVID complications will still be able to receive vaccines, Makary wrote.

But one of the preexisting conditions he listed was pregnancy, contradicting Tuesday’s announcement on the CDC’s new recommendations for COVID vaccines.

Pregnant people, in particular, have a higher risk of dying from COVID because their blood volume is higher and their immune systems slightly suppressed during pregnancy, Offit said. And CHOP still sees children in its emergency department with severe COVID, he said.

Because the COVID vaccine will no longer be recommended for children, Offit added, it’s likely that Vaccines for Children, a federal program that funds free immunizations for children, will not pay for COVID vaccines.

“You don’t have to be in a high-risk group to die of COVID,” he said. “What will happen now is that there are people who would clearly benefit from the vaccine who will not be able to get it. It will increase suffering and hospitalizations.”

Insurance companies may also balk at covering vaccines for anyone without preexisting conditions under 65, he said.

Offit said that the FDA’s expert advisory committee was not consulted on the licensing decision, nor was there a period of public comment. He said people concerned with the decision should consider writing to the FDA to express their disapproval.

“They made a unilateral decision behind closed doors,” he said.

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