CDC no longer recommends COVID vaccine for children, pregnant women

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed the COVID-19 vaccine from its suggested immunization schedule for healthy children and pregnant women. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared the change in a statement on Tuesday, describing the shift as common sense. Kennedy’s statement included a video of himself announcing the change alongside National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary. The Biden administration continually urged healthy children to get repeated COVID-19 booster shots despite a lack of supportive clinical evidence, Kennedy said. There’s no evidence that healthy children should take it anymore, and most other countries have stopped recommending it, Makary said.

What other changes is Kennedy making? Last week, FDA leaders announced a new protocol framework recommending that only adults age 65 and up who also have underlying health conditions take the vaccine. Makary penned an editorial with Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which was published by the New England Journal of Medicine. The FDA’s new COVID-19 framework will balance regulatory flexibility and a commitment to gold-standard science, according to the editorial. Health leaders will approve vaccines for at-risk people but still demand robust and trustworthy data to constitute vaccines for low-risk patients, it added.

Dig deeper: Read Elizabeth Russell’s report on the FDA’s plan to phase out synthetic food dyes. Also, read my report on Kennedy launching studies to identify the cause of autism.