CDC ends the covid vaccine recommendation for healthy children and pregnant women

The centers for disease control and prevention will no longer recommend routine shots for healthy children and pregnant women, the Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday.

“Now we are one step closer to realizing @Potus's promise to make the United States again healthy,” he said in an X publication.

Kennedy said the vaccine would no longer be recommended for “healthy pregnant women”, but it was not clear who would qualify since pregnancy itself is considered a risk factor for Covid complications.

The change of CDCs occurs a week after the Commissioner of the Food and Medicines Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, announced that the agency planned to restrict the use of covid shots to older adults and children and adults with underlying medical conditions.

The new covid shots for healthy children and adults must go through long controlled clinical trials with placebo before they can be approved.

Kennedy has a long history of opposition to a variety of vaccines, including Covid taking. In 2021, he presented a citizen petition requesting that the FDA revokes the authorization of vaccines. The same year, he described Covid vaccines as “the most fatal vaccine ever made”, specifically due to rare cases of myocarditis in young men. Studies have found that the risk of myocarditis is greater in people with a COVID infection and generally more serious than after vaccination.

Under Kennedy, the FDA slowly walked the approval of Novavax's shot before approved at the beginning of this month. In an unusual movement, the FDA limited its use for people over 65 and adolescents and adults with at least one condition that puts them at risk of serious diseases.

There are no mandates in the US. Uu. For anyone to get the Covid shot.

But experts say that millions of people, even those who have had an anterior COVID infection, may still need another dose because they are vulnerable to serious virus diseases, particularly older adults, people with weakened immune systems and pregnant women.

In the apogee of the Covid pandemic, doctors reported an unprecedented increase in hospitalized pregnant women and in critical condition after a Covid infection.

Changes in a woman's immune system during pregnancy increase the risk of complications such as the pneumonia of many respiratory viruses, including Covid. Last month, researchers at the School of Public Health at Brown published a study that discovered that maternal deaths shot when the pandemic hit.

While COVID cases, including hospitalizations and related deaths, are currently low, the virus still circulates.

“We still have children in our emergency department with Covid. When we see them, they have bronchiolitis or bronchitis,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center in Children's Hospital de Pennsylvania. “Do you consider that it is not worthy of prevention?”

The CDC previously recommended COVID vaccines in all areas for all 6 months onwards.

“One of the things that I relied as a pediatrician was a guarantee that the recommendations that occurred to me were based on the best science and evidence available, and came from the work of the expert advisors of the CDC,” said Dr. Richard Besser, former interim director of the CDC and the president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “This clearly does not come from that direction concerting “.

There are concerns among experts in infectious diseases and vaccines, whether COVID vaccines will be available for autumn. In 2024, the reinforcements were approved in August and were widely available in October.

The FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee met Thursday to make a recommendation on what strains should be included in the next round of shooting. Covid's summer waves have occurred every year since 2020 before going back in autumn and winter during the typical flu season.

There are still no indications that the United States is entering a wave this summer, but experts closely monitor the last variant, called LP.8.1.

The variant is an OMICRON branch. In February, the World Health Organization said it was monitoring LP.8.1. As of May 10, it constituted 70% of Covid cases in the US.

WHO is also monitoring another variant, NB.1.8.1, which has been reported in several states.

The early deployment of the shots of this fall could be at risk after a significant change under the guidance of Kennedy and Makary on how vaccines are tested.

Under the change of Kennedy, all new vaccines must go through clinical tests controlled by placebo, where some people receive the real shot and others obtain something inactive, such as a saline shot, to compare the results.

The original COVID vaccines, of Pfizer and Modern, approved at the end of 2020, went through controlled tests with placebo.

If the FDA considers the updated Pfizer and modern vaccines as “new” products, which require new tests, it is extremely unlikely that the doses would be ready for the fall for anyone, including older people or very immunocompromised.

The recommendation of the CDC is crucial because it guides insurance companies in which vaccines will cover at no cost to patients.

Pfizer and Modern are charging up to $ 150 per dose for a COVID vaccine, according to the CDC vaccine price list. The agency does not list the cost of the Novavax vaccine, which was fully approved earlier this month.

Medicare and Medicaid require that vaccines be free for patients. The law of low price health care, more commonly known as Obamacare, requires private insurers to cover all vaccines that recommend the CDC committee and vaccine director.

Children without insurance can obtain free vaccines through the Vaccine Program for children administered by the Government. But the mass cuts to the financing of medical care presented in March forced some local and state health departments to fire staff and cancel vaccine clinics.

If CDC stops recommending Covid vaccines for pregnant children or women, the question arises: will private insurance or medicaid follow the cost of new reinforcements?

“It will be a waterfall of events,” said Offit. “They will be that insurance companies will not pay, the children's program may not pay it, but therefore more expensive, less available and less used.”