The nation’s largest pediatrician group is expanding its lawsuit against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The doctors want to reverse last year’s decision to remove the COVID‑19 vaccine from the childhood vaccine schedule, and this year’s removal of six others.
Until now, the CDC recommended more than 70 shots throughout childhood. That number has been reduced by about half according to the new vaccine schedule that is already in effect.
“The president asked us to change, to look at what European countries were doing—which have much less chronic disease than we do—and to find out what the best practices were there and to implement them,” Kennedy said.
The CDC still recommends all children be vaccinated against 11 diseases, such as polio, mumps, measles, rubella, tetanus, and chickenpox. But a half‑dozen diseases were dropped from the list—including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, RSV, flu, some forms of meningitis, and rotavirus—which are now recommended only for children deemed high‑risk or through “shared decision‑making” with a health care provider.
Kennedy said, “It doesn’t take anybody’s vaccine away from them. Every vaccine will be insured. Every vaccine will be part of the Vaccines for Children program. They will be paid for.”
President Trump said the new schedule is “rooted in the gold standard of science and widely agreed upon by scientists and experts all over the world,” adding that “many Americans, especially the ‘MAHA moms,’ have been praying for these common‑sense reforms for many years.”
FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary says the recommendations are designed to increase vaccine participation by identifying the most important ones.
Dr. Makary said, “We’ve seen vaccination rates go down in the Biden years because of ignoring natural immunity and cloth masks on toddlers for three years and shutting kids out of school. A lot of dogma resulted in loss of public health trust. We’re trying to rebuild that trust by giving them a hierarchy of vaccines.”
Dr. Sean O’Leary of the American Academy of Pediatrics said, “Tragically, our federal government can no longer be trusted in this role.”
He says the move has instead fueled vaccine misinformation tied to Kennedy’s previous claims.
“Frankly, a lot of these falsehoods have been spread by our HHS Secretary over the last couple of decades that we then deal with in the office. The problem is, now they are coming from our federal government. And so it’s an incredibly challenging time. You know, vaccines are a good thing,” Dr. O’Leary said.
Many doctors have expressed plans to follow the old schedule.
Dr. Robert Hopkins from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases said, “This administration has decided that they think they know better than the independent science‑based experts that made recommendations for vaccination of our children for over 50 years.”
So while health care experts and parents seek what’s best for children, exactly what that is continues to divide many Americans.
