U.S health officials announced Monday that they would dramatically reduce the number of vaccinations recommended for babies and children, a decision that officials say they made after reviewing the childhood vaccine schedules of other developed countries.

The Trump administration announced it was reducing the number of immunizations routinely recommended to children from 17 to 11, a move that had been long signaled by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. It means the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer broadly recommend children receive vaccines for rotavirus, influenza, meningococcal disease, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and hepatitis A and B. 

The CDC cannot mandate state policies on childhood vaccines, but its recommendations carry great weight with local health officials.

The CDC said it will recommend that the flu, Covid-19 and rotavirus shots only be administered to children and babies after shared clinical decision-making, which means consulting with a doctor before receiving them. 

Other vaccines, including for meningococcal, hepatitis A and B and RSV vaccines, will be recommended only for children and babies in high-risk groups.

The polio, chicken pox and MMR vaccines, among others, will remain widely recommended, according to the new vaccine schedule.

Dr. Carlos del Rio, chair of the Department of Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine, said in an email that the changes to the schedule are “not unreasonable.” But he expressed concern that officials narrowed the recommendations for the hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus and Meningococcal vaccines, since “all these are very effective and safe vaccines.”

The decision is a major change to the U.S. vaccine schedule for babies and children. 

Jim O’Neill, the CDC acting director, signed a memorandum on Monday accepting the recommendations of other top officials who initiated a review last month. The review came after President Donald Trump directed Kennedy to “review best practices from peer, developed countries for core childhood vaccination recommendations” and “update the United States core childhood vaccine schedule to align with such scientific evidence and best practices” from those nations.

In updating the list of recommended vaccines, health officials bypassed a CDC committee, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, designed to make those decisions. 

A senior health official told reporters that the committee, which Kennedy overhauled last year with his own handpicked appointees, “continues to be important” and “will continue to meet multiple times a year.”

Officials said insurers will continue to cover the cost of vaccines that are no longer widely recommended.

“There is no vaccine for which health insurance coverage is removed,” a senior official told reporters. “So everybody who wants to have a vaccine can still get it.”

But Fiona Havers, who spent 13 years working on vaccine policy at CDC before resigning last year, accused HHS of “sowing doubt and confusion among both parents and providers in a way that will lead directly to few children receiving vaccines.”

“As a result of these changes, more children will be unprotected from serious and potentially fatal diseases, and we will see an increase in hospitalizations and deaths among American children,” Havers said.

Havers added that recommending the RSV vaccine only for high-risk children makes little sense because most infants hospitalized with the virus are otherwise healthy, a data point CDC scientists relayed to agency brass in a presentation last month.

Scientists at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases informed top agency officials that roughly 80% of children under two years of age who are hospitalized with RSV are previously healthy and have no chronic medical conditions, according to a copy of the slides reviewed by MS NOW and three people familiar with the situation.

“All infants are at risk of RSV hospitalization,” the scientists wrote in the presentation, which was dated Dec. 18.

Health officials told reporters that HHS will fund new studies to determine the safety of the vaccines, even though experts insist the vaccines available in the United States have already been proven to be safe.

This article originally misstated the number of shots the CDC recommends to children. The text has been corrected.

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