The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its independent vaccine advisory panel have quietly moved to expand access to COVID-19 vaccinations for pregnant women, effectively reversing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s earlier decision to halt the recommendation.
According to an update posted this month on the CDC’s website, the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted in September to recommend COVID-19 shots for adults under a “shared clinical decision-making” model — meaning patients and their doctors decide together.
While the panel did not explicitly vote on pregnancy, the language appears to include expectant mothers, expanding access through pharmacies and insurance coverage, according to Politico.
Neither the advisory panel nor the CDC publicly acknowledged that the vote undermines Kennedy’s May decision to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy — a change he made without waiting for the advisory panel’s input.
It remains unclear whether all 12 panel members, who were appointed by Kennedy, realized their vote would undo his policy.
Much of the two-day September meeting in Atlanta reportedly involved confusion among new members unfamiliar with the panel’s procedures, the report said.
The development surprised legal observers.
Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at the University of California, San Francisco, said the change should have been explicitly addressed, given that Kennedy’s previous reversal was made directly and publicly.
“Under these circumstances, if they were going to change the decision about pregnancy, I would have expected them to address it expressly, since it was changed expressly [by Kennedy],” Reiss said, according to the report.
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