Making Sense of Medical Science (MSMS)

On May 27, 2025, RFK, Jr. continued his anti-vaccine crusade by announcing that the CDC would no longer recommend COVID vaccines for children and pregnant women. The announcement was a complete surprise to medical scientists, physicians, and other healthcare professionals. It also was a huge surprise to the CDC, which was completely blindsided by the abrupt change in its vaccination recommendations. This misguided announcement also goes against the most recent data showing who is getting hospitalized and who is dying from COVID that Kennedy should be aware of but seems to be oblivious to.

On April 15, 2025, just one month before RFK Jr.’s misguided announcement, Fiona Havers from the CDC presented the following data to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the independent group of experts that advises the CDC on vaccines, and which Kennedy has purged and replaced with his hand-picked vaccine nay-sayers. Havers reported the following from the previous year in the US.

• In just one year, 2024, about 165,000 people were hospitalized with COVID and 40,000 died from the virus. Of these, ~7100 COVID hospitalizations occurred in children and 150 of them died from the disease; more than who died from the flu. Most of the hospitalized were less than 4 years old and otherwise healthy (that is, had no co-morbid conditions to contribute the severity of their illness).

• About 1 in 5 children hospitalized with COVID were admitted to the intensive care unit.

• Significantly, >90 percent of these children who were hospitalized or died from COVID weren’t vaccinated.

• A disproportionate number of children who died from COVID were <6 months old. Since newborns <6 months old have only rudimentary immune systems that need to mature over time, these children are initially protected from infectious diseases from their mothers’ antibodies that cross the placenta during fetal gestation. Thus, the only way these children could have been protected from COVID would have been if their mothers had been vaccinated during pregnancy as I explained earlier in these pages.

Research data clearly have shown that vaccinating children and pregnant women is safe. Therefore, Kennedy’s change in the CDC vaccination recommendations, without feedback from the CDC, is reckless and will endanger the lives of thousands of children in years to come.

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