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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer recommend the Covid vaccine for healthy children and pregnant women, a move the health and human services secretary says will bring the country “one step closer to realizing President Trump's promise to Make America Healthy Again.”
“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 recommended immunization schedule,” Kennedy said in a video posted to social media on Tuesday.
As The New York Times reported, Kennedy’s decision "upends the standard process for such recommendations, which are made by advisers to the C.D.C. and accepted — or overruled — by the agency’s director. The health secretary is typically not directly involved in these matters, but the C.D.C. does not currently have a permanent director."
Kennedy was joined in his video announcement by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, who just last week announced the FDA planned to restrict Covid shots for healthy Americans younger than 65. “The F.D.A. will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” Makary wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Makary said any new Covid booster shots must undergo placebo-controlled clinical trials before they can be approved for wider use. The original Covid shots, produced by Pfizer and Moderna, already went through placebo-controlled trials in 2020.
The CDC previously recommended Covid vaccines for everyone 6 months and older (the agency's website continued to reflect that guidance as of Tuesday afternoon). While children are less likely to become seriously ill from Covid, as NBC News reported, “changes in a woman’s immune system during pregnancy increase the risk of complications like pneumonia from many respiratory viruses, including Covid.”
During the height of the pandemic, doctors reported that Covid infections caused an “unprecedented surge” of hospitalizations in pregnant women. A new study from Brown University School of Public Health, released in April, found that maternal deaths spiked when the pandemic hit.
Vaccinating pregnant women also helps protect their newborn babies from the virus, since they can’t get vaccinated themselves but are at high risk for serious complications if infected.
Before joining the administration, Kennedy advocated against the Covid vaccine, which he has called “the deadliest vaccine ever made," citing rare cases of myocarditis in young men, NBC News reported. "Studies have found that the risk of myocarditis is higher in people with a Covid infection and usually more severe than after vaccination," according to NBC News. In 2021, Kennedy filed a petition requesting that the FDA revoke authorization for all Covid vaccines.
Earlier this month, when he was questioned about his past vaccine skepticism, he told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that his “opinions about vaccines are irrelevant” and said nobody should be “taking medical advice” from him
Many Americans could soon pay a price for Kennedy’s decision. Insurance companies use CDC recommendations for guidance on which vaccines to cover at no out-of-pocket cost to the patient. While Medicare and Medicaid require that the vaccines be free, private insurers are only mandated to cover vaccines that are recommended by the CDC’s vaccine committee and director.
According to the CDC’s vaccine price list, Pfizer and Moderna are currently charging $136.75 and $141.80, respectively, per dose for a Covid vaccine.