Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stunned federal health officials on Tuesday by abruptly announcing that the COVID-19 vaccine would no longer be recommended for children and healthy pregnant women—a major policy reversal reportedly made without input from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to The Washington Post, agency officials were left scrambling after Kennedy dropped the news, not in a press release or internal memo, but in a video posted to X. That’s how CDC staff—and the rest of the country—found out.
This is literal life-and-death policy, yet Kennedy is treating it like a social media stunt.
Five hours after the video dropped, CDC officials finally received a one-page “secretarial directive” dated May 19—nearly a week earlier. It was signed by Kennedy but contradicted parts of his own video, deepening the confusion, according to multiple federal health officials who spoke to the Post anonymously.
In the video, Kennedy suggested he had unilaterally reversed CDC guidance recommending annual COVID shots for everyone six months and older, including healthy pregnant women. CDC officials told the Post that they learned about this “when it was tweeted.”
“People were scrambling to find out what it meant,” one federal health official said.
Kennedy also claimed the recommendations had already been pulled from the CDC website when they hadn’t. And how could they have been? Top CDC officials said they were blindsided, which is galling considering it’s the CDC’s job to issue that kind of advice in the first place.
As of Thursday, the CDC still recommended the COVID-19 vaccination for everyone six months and older, including people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to conceive, or planning to get pregnant.
The directive, meanwhile, shared internally only after the fact, ordered the CDC to remove the COVID-19 vaccines from both the child and adolescent immunization schedule and the list of recommended vaccines during pregnancy. But its vague wording raised even more questions: Did Kennedy’s directive apply to all children, or just “healthy” ones?
“It’s unclear,” one official told the Post.
Adding to the disconnect, top officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had just published a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine affirming that pregnancy is a high-risk condition for COVID-19 and a reason to get vaccinated, directly contradicting Kennedy’s claim.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon tried to paper over the inconsistencies, saying the directive simply advises against recommending the vaccine for “healthy” children and pregnant women. But he didn’t explain the glaring discrepancies between Kennedy’s video, the directive itself, and the FDA’s public guidance.
“Secretary Kennedy is taking urgent action to ensure the public’s safety when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines,” Nixon said.
That “urgent action” looks a lot more like sabotage, though. While the FDA still controls vaccine approvals, it’s the CDC that sets national immunization guidance. And under President Donald Trump, that guidance has been steadily gutted. Just this week, the Trump administration also canceled a $600 million contract with Moderna meant to develop a bird flu vaccine for humans—another blow to public health preparedness.
There’s no mystery here. Kennedy is using his post to undermine vaccine infrastructure. And he’s not being subtle about it.
Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told the Post that some of Kennedy’s recent moves are just the latest escalation in his “continued war against vaccines.”
“They’ve made it much less insurable, and therefore this could make it much less available for people,” Offit said. “His goal is to make vaccines less available, less affordable, and more feared. That’s his goal, and this is what he’s doing.”
Kennedy displayed this hesitancy earlier this year with a measles outbreak. But Kennedy isn’t just undermining access—he’s screwing up the science, too.
Related | RFK Jr. lives up to his anti-vaxxer reputation amid measles outbreak
On Thursday, NOTUS reported that his “Make America Healthy Again” report, which he claimed was based on a “gold standard” of science, cited fake studies and drew false conclusions.
In one example, epidemiologist Katherine Keyes said she was falsely credited with coauthoring a study that doesn’t exist. “The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
Predictably, the Trump administration tried to explain away the screwups, blaming “formatting issues.” A White House spokesperson wouldn’t even confirm whether artificial intelligence had been used to write the report.
Team Trump might try to justify Kennedy’s incompetence, but it’s hard to ignore. We already knew the former anti-vaccine activist was unqualified. Now it’s clear he’s also dangerous. And with Trump backing him at every step, the consequences for public health could be long-lasting.
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