The Trump administration is planning to drop recommendations that pregnant women, teenagers and children get Covid-19 vaccines as a matter of routine, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Department of Health and Human Services, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is expected to remove the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations for those groups around the same time it launches a new framework for approving vaccines, the people said.
The exact timing of the announcement wasn’t clear, the people said, though it was expected in the coming days.
The CDC currently recommends that everyone six months and older, including pregnant women, should receive Covid-19 vaccines. It wasn’t clear if the department is planning to remove the recommendation for Covid-19 shots entirely for those groups, or just suggest that patients talk with their doctors about risks and benefits.
Spokespeople for HHS, CDC and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kennedy has long been a foe of the Covid-19 vaccines and petitioned the Food and Drug Administration in 2021 to revoke their emergency-use authorizations. Trump appointees working closely with him have also been critics of the shots, especially those that use messenger-RNA technology or are authorized for use in children.
“Separate from my role as a regulator at the FDA, I am not encouraging or insisting young, healthy children to get a Covid shot unless there is new evidence that emerges that suggests there is a clear benefit,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary said Thursday.
Moderna, and Pfizer and BioNTech, have Covid-19 shots using messenger-RNA technology that have received emergency authorizations for use in children as young as six months, and full approvals for those 12 and older. Novavax’s shot, which uses an older protein technology, has authorization for children 12 and up.
Moderna and Pfizer didn’t respond immediately to requests for comment. Novavax declined to comment.
As secretary, Kennedy has the legal power to change the CDC’s vaccine recommendations. Politico earlier reported that Kennedy was weighing the move.
Richard Hughes, a lawyer and vaccine advocate, said he was worried about immunocompromised people who prefer to have friends and family vaccinated. He also said the move would “have a behavioral impact on whether people choose to get vaccinated.”
The change means that the administration is backing away from one of the signature health achievements of Trump’s first term—Operation Warp Speed, the effort that quickly launched the Covid vaccines. It also means that fewer people may get the shots, which are already taken by relatively few children. And it could mean that insurers become less likely to cover the shots.
Fewer people are getting Covid-19 shots than in the early days of the pandemic. As of April, about 13% of children and 14% of pregnant women had received the most recent Covid shot, according to the CDC.
In addition to the CDC recommendation changes, the FDA is also planning to roll out a new framework for vaccine approvals next week, Makary told a conference room full of food and drug lawyers Thursday. He didn’t give details but suggested later to reporters that vaccine companies might be required to submit more data to the FDA. The agency asked that of Maryland-based Novavax, which is seeking full approval for its Covid-19 vaccines. HHS has said it would require placebo testing for all new vaccines.
“We want to see vaccines that are available for high-risk individuals,” Makary told reporters. “And at the same time, we want some good science. We want some good clinical data.”
The initial versions of the Covid-19 vaccines were tested against placebos in large trials. Later updates underwent testing in smaller groups of patients to show that they successfully triggered immune systems to fight the virus.
