U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday announced that COVID-19 vaccines are no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women.
In a 58-second video posted on the social media site X, Kennedy said he removed COVID-19 shots from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations for those groups. No one from the CDC was in the video, and CDC officials referred questions about the announcement to Kennedy and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
On Tuesday, Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), skewered the decision by Kennedy on WCCO's Chad Hartman Show.
"What we're watching is the wholesale destruction of public health as we know it in this country, specifically around the vaccine issue," Osterholm said. "I can point out a number of severe challenges to what was shared."
U.S. health officials, following recommendations by infectious disease experts, have been urging annual COVID-19 boosters for all Americans ages 6 months and older. Osterholm says pregnant women shouldn't be overlooked either.
"We have ample data showing the increased risk of COVID among pregnant women," Dr. Osterholm explains. "If there was ever a group that needs to be vaccinated, it's them. And if you looked as of this morning, pregnant women were still listed on the CDC website as in fact being at increased risk. So what you saw happen here, was an arbitrary decision made by a couple of people who did not have the expertise to do it."
A CDC advisory panel is set to meets in June to make recommendations about the fall shots. Among its options are suggesting shots for high-risk groups but still giving lower-risk people the choice to get vaccinated.
But Kennedy, a leading anti-vaccine advocate before becoming health secretary, decided not to wait. He said that annual COVID-19 booster shots have been recommended for kids “despite the lack of any clinical data” to support that decision.
Osterholm also pointed out that Kennedy said during his hearings for approval of Secretary of Health and Human Services that he would not take vaccines away from anyone, something that has now been shown to be untrue.
"He's just done that now with both COVID vaccines for individuals who have high risk scenarios, i.e. pregnant women, and for children," says Osterholm. "And you can say, 'well, why children?' It turns out that COVID still raises a major public health challenge with children in this past year. Even though we had a very bad flu year, the number of hospitalizations and serious illnesses for kids with COVID was just as high as it was for influenza. Now we routinely recommend influenza all the time as a vaccine to help prevent that kind of serious illness, hospitalizations, and even deaths. So there's no logic as to why you wouldn't allow people to have it."
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and Dr. Jay Battacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health, appeared in the video with Kennedy.
Kennedy and other Trump administration appointees have been moving to narrow COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and added restrictions to a recent vaccine approval. Last week, the FDA announced routine COVID-19 vaccine approvals will be limited to seniors and younger people with underlying medical risks, pending new research for healthy adults and children.
Osterholm says one person, able to circumvent the traditional, expert-driven model on health policies, is a reason for concern.
"So at this point, this model really serves to suggest that any vaccine that Mr. Kennedy wanted to take off the market right now he could," Osterholm told WCCO. "If you want to take measles vaccine off, it's very possible he could. This is a scary, scary proposition."
One of the fallouts of this new policy from the federal government is insurance companies no longer covering vaccines, putting the onus on individuals to pay for vaccines themselves which is unaffordable for some people. Osterholm says that's just one of the problems.
"The cost is important, but again, we still should come back to that fundamental point of, are these vaccines effective and are they safe? And they circumvented that entire process here," he notes. "They basically made it seem as if somehow the data does not exist to address these issues. But they do. So, I think that what we have, is really this concept of a gold standard of science they keep promoting, and it's the most anti-gold standard of science that I could imagine."
Osterholm also addressed a common criticism of those advocating for COVID vaccines, saying this in no way is meant to be a mandate.
"Let me just be really clear to this audience, none of us are talking about mandating these vaccines," he said. "We're talking about just availability. We're talking about the fact that half the kids that died from COVID in this country last year actually had no underlying health condition, meaning that you could have flagged them ahead of time and said they should get vaccines. So if I'm a parent, a responsible parent, I make my kids wear their safe seatbelts in the car. I also want to have them protected against the serious outcome with COVID. Why not let them? You're not."
HHS officials did not immediately respond to questions about why Kennedy decided to take the step now or release additional information about what went into the decision.