On May 27, 2025, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend Covid-19 booster shots for healthy children and pregnant women. In the announcement, Kennedy erroneously claimed that the Biden administration had “urged healthy children to get yet another Covid shot despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children.”
Dorit Reiss, a law professor at UC San Francisco, noted, “The [HHS] secretary has never been involved in making vaccine recommendations,” which are typically first considered by the independent vaccine experts who make up the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Vaccine Practices (ACIP). Kennedy postponed the first public ACIP meeting of the second Trump administration.
Update: An HHS memo sent to Congress in support of Kennedy’s decision has been met with criticism from experts, who have labeled it as "willful medical disinformation" and alleged that it cites disputed or unpublished studies and distorts legitimate research.
In two instances, the memo claims that the Covid vaccine poses dangers to pregnant women, but cites papers that affirm the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines for pregnant women. Another study cited in the memo is a preprint and has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, and includes an alert that "[the study] reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice."