The Trump administration is overhauling the list of routine shots recommended for all babies and children in the United States, bypassing the government’s typical process for recommending vaccines and delivering on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s long-standing goals to upend the nation’s pediatric vaccine schedule.
Effective immediately, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer recommend every child be immunized for rotavirus, influenza, meningococcal disease, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and hepatitis A, according to materials released Monday by the Department of Health and Human Services. Instead, the agency will recommend smaller groups of children and babies should get those vaccines only if they are at high risk or if a doctor recommends it.
Administration health officials said they were aligning U.S. recommendations more closely with vaccine schedules in other countries, citing decreased public confidence in vaccinations, especially following the covid-19 pandemic. Officials said the change would improve public trust in the vaccination schedule and lead to greater uptake of important vaccines, such as MMR, to protect against measles, a highly contagious virus that can cause massive outbreaks.
“We are aligning the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule with international consensus while strengthening transparency and informed consent,” Kennedy said in a statement. “This decision protects children, respects families, and rebuilds trust in public health.”
Children could still receive vaccines that are no longer broadly recommended by the federal government, and public and private insurers would still have to pay for them, officials said.
Medical associations and public health advocates and experts condemned the revisions to the vaccine schedule, arguing they endanger children and are built on faulty assumptions. They said comparisons to other countries are misleading because they differ sharply in population, access to universal health care and disease burdens.
The revised schedule will result in fewer doses and fewer vaccines being given in the U.S., according to industry and public health experts.
“Today’s announcement by federal health officials to arbitrarily stop recommending numerous routine childhood immunizations is dangerous and unnecessary,” Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement.
Racine said the AAP will continue to publish its own childhood vaccine guidance, maintaining the routine recommendations scrapped by the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump in early December ordered the review of the childhood immunization schedule to align with other countries, calling the U.S. an “outlier” that recommends far more shots than necessary. The changes also delivers a win to anti-vaccine groups that have long sought to drastically curtail the number of recommended childhood vaccines.
Mary Holland, chief executive of the Children’s Health Defense anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, described the new vaccine schedule as marking “the most significant change in U.S. vaccination policy in recent history.”
“We are also grateful to the President and Secretary Kennedy for having the courage and integrity to address this problem honestly and transparently,” Holland said in a statement.
During a briefing with reporters to explain the new vaccine policy, senior HHS officials who spoke on background as ground rules for the briefing, said a panel that recommends vaccines — the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — won’t vote on the new recommendations. They said the decision does not sideline the panel.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), a Republican who cast a pivotal vote to confirm Kennedy and has challenged hischanges to vaccine recommendations, wrote on X that “changing the pediatric vaccine schedule based on no scientific input on safety risks and little transparency will cause unnecessary fear for patients and doctors, and will make America sicker.”
The Monday announcement preserves broad government recommendations for core childhood vaccines credited with eliminating once-rampant diseases, including measles and polio, sharply reducing childhood illness, disability and death.
But the government is also retreating from a full endorsement of immunization for the annual respiratory virus season, such as influenza and RSV, which together kill hundreds of children and babies every year. It’s a shift public health experts warn could leave families without clear guidance as those viruses hospitalize tens of thousands of children every year. The move marks a significant departure from the government’s traditional role in promoting routine immunization to blunt predictable seasonal surges of disease.
Federal officials are limiting some immunizations that were broadly recommended to certain high-risk groups or populations, including for RSV, hepatitis A and meningitis. Officials said they didn’t undergo a fresh assessment of who is considered high risk.
For other vaccines, including for flu and rotavirus, the federal government is recommending them under a designation known as “shared clinical decision-making” that allows children to get the shots after families consult with their health care providers. The CDC already shifted to this model for coronavirus vaccines in the fall.
Critics of this approach, including from medical organizations and vaccine experts, say doctors often rely on the CDC for recommending vaccines to patients and that it would cause enormous confusion and cast doubt on the safety of shots.
The new set of recommendations align the U.S. more closely with Denmark’s schedule, something administration officials had previously suggested. Public health advocates have criticized comparisons to Denmark, noting it has a universal health care system for a small population of 6 million.
The new guidance departs from the Danish schedule in two ways. The CDC will retain a recommendation for children to get the chicken pox vaccine, and it will recommend just one dose of the HPV vaccine, instead of two, as Denmark recommends. Officials cited research finding a single shot is as effective as two.
But the Food and Drug Administration recently told the HPV vaccine manufacturer Merck that there is not enough evidence to conclude that a single dose provides the same protection against cervical cancer as two doses, according to a May 2025 company press release.
The shift to recommending one dose could lead to insurers eventually not covering a second HPV dose, an HHS spokesman said.
Kathryn Edwards, a pediatric infectious-disease physician and vaccinologist who has studied vaccines for 40 years, said the changes in the immunization schedule will result in massive confusion for pediatricians and families and demoralize pediatricians who have seen children die of the diseases.
She also said it is wrong for the administration to characterize the United States as an outlier compared with other countries.
“We’re like a bunch of different countries,” she said. “We are like high-income ones, but also like some like middle-income countries that don’t have access to care.”
Under Kennedy’s leadership, federal health agencies have upended and scrutinized childhood vaccination policies. They have launched reviews of the cumulative health effects of the immunization schedule. The CDC eliminated a recommendation for all newborns to receive a hepatitis B vaccine shortly after birth, which researchers and health experts credited for a dramatic plunge in infections. Kennedy directed revisions to a CDC webpage that previously debunked a link between vaccines and autism to instead say health authorities have ignored evidence of a link and studies have not ruled out a purported link.
Ahead of his confirmation, Kennedy told senators he supports the childhood immunization schedule and would do nothing that “makes it difficult or discourages people from taking vaccines.”
Lauren Weber contributed to this report.
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