The country’s main public health agency published new recommendations indicating that healthy children and pregnant women can be vaccinated against COVID-19, eliminating the most forceful language indicated that these groups should be vaccinated.
The change occurs days after the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced that Vaccines against COVID-19 will no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant women.
However, updated guidelines on the Internet site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) send a more nuanced message, indicating that “they can” manage vaccines to those groups.
“The announcement of the beginning of this week seemed to indicate that the CDCs were completely withdrawing any statement that could be interpreted as a recommendation of these vaccines for these populations,” said Jason Schwartz, a health policy researcher at Yale University. “It’s not as bad as it could have been.”
Kennedy announced the next changes in a 58 -second video published on Tuesday on the social network X. In the video no representative of the CDC appearedand CDC officials have sent the questions about the announcement to Kennedy and the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
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On Thursday, the CDCs updated their Internet portal. The agency said that vaccines can be administered to children between 6 months and 17 who do not have moderate or serious problems in their immune system. Instead of recommending vaccines, CDC now claim that parents can decide to vaccinate their children after consulting a doctor.
A subtle update of a CDC page on the adult vaccination calendar indicated a similar change in the recommendation for pregnant women, which it excluded from the routine recommendation for other adults.
“The previous recommendations on the COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children under 18 and for pregnant women have been eliminated from the CDC vaccination calendar,” said an HHS spokesman in a statement. “CDC and HHS encourage people to speak with their medical care provider about any personal medical decision.”
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This type of recommendation, known as shared decision making, means that Medical insurers must still pay vaccinesaccording to CDC. However, experts claim that vaccination rates tend to be lower when health authorities use that language and doctors are less emphatic with patients about the need to vaccinate.
Child vaccination rates against COVID-19 are already low: only 13 % of children and 23 % of adults have received the COVID-19 vaccine by 2024-25, according to CDC data.
He has been talking about changing the recommendations. As COVID-19 have been referring, experts have discussed the possibility of focusing vaccination efforts on people 65 years of age or older, who are among those who run the greatest risk of death and hospitalization.
An advisory committee of the CDC will meet in June to Formulate Recommendations on Autumn Vaccines. Among the options is to recommend vaccination to high -risk groups, but continue offering low -risk people the option to vaccinate. A committee’s work group has supported the idea.
However, Kennedy, an outstanding defender against vaccines before becoming Secretary of Health, decided not to wait for the review of the Scientific Committee.
The new changes in the recommendations on vaccines, the moment they were announced and the way they have been communicated have created a confusion that can be “incredibly harmful to the success of vaccination programs,” said Schwartz.
“It would be understandable that the population was completely baffled As for what the federal government thinks and what science suggests (…) about the tests of safety and value of these vaccines, “he added.
