Last week, the Centers for Disease Control reduced the list of recommended vaccines for all children aged 11 to 18, marking vaccines for influenza, hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, meningococcus, RSV, and COVID-19 to only be recommended for “high-risk” children or after “shared clinical-decision-making” between doctors and parents.
The changes to the CDC’s immunization schedule follow a memo from President Donald Trump, released on Dec. 5, 2025, directing health officials to assess how the U.S. childhood immunization schedule compares with other countries. Denmark, with just 10 recommended childhood vaccines, was cited as an example. Disease risks, along with differences between Denmark’s and the United States’s healthcare systems, were not discussed in the memo.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, stated that children are getting too many vaccines that are overwhelming their immune systems and causing a variety of chronic diseases. Experts in pediatrics and vaccines, as well as the general medical community, strongly disagree.
“The medical and scientific community see the CDC’s new guidance for what it has become: an extension of RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda,” says Dr. Paul Offit, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Offit is nationally recognized as a leading vaccine expert and is a co-inventor of a licensed rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq.
“289 children died of the flu last year, and there have already been at least another 17 children that have died since January 1 of this year,” says Offit. “We haven’t seen numbers like that since the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and RFK Jr. recently got on CBS News and said that it would be ‘better’ for fewer children to receive the flu vaccine amid a flu epidemic.”
Physicians and other medical professionals have reported increased rates of questions surrounding the safety and effects of vaccines, stemming from uncredited and inflammatory statements made by federal organizations.
“Prior to this administration, we used to refer patients and families to the CDC website to learn about vaccines, but that is no longer being done because of the misinformation that they are putting out.” says Dr. Daniel Taylor, Associate Professor at Drexel University’s College of Medicine and Pediatrician at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. “There is a lot of distrust that is being pushed onto physicians, especially pediatricians. We have had relationships with these families forever, and now the HHS and CDC are sowing seeds of doubt that are not based on any credible science, whatsoever.”
Clinicians are increasingly urging families to rely on decades of established peer-reviewed consensus that defined the original guidelines, rather than the rising tide of anti-science rhetoric that spreads quickly but has little to no evidence-based foundation.
“The development of what has been the pediatric schedule was based on expert opinion of years and years of study and use that demonstrated the benefit of vaccines,” says Dr. Judith Wolf, Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases & HIV Medicine at Drexel’s College of Medicine.
“With Hepatitis A, before we had recommendations for universal vaccinations for young children, the rates of Hepatitis A were high with older populations, and it causes disability and hospitalization,” says Wolf. “Once vaccination was introduced for children, who act as vectors of disease even though they could be asymptomatic, the map of outbreaks across the United States began to clear up.”
Offit broke down some of the inconsistencies in RFK Jr.’s statements. “RFK Jr. and I were both children in the early 1950s who got the smallpox and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccines. The smallpox vaccine had about 200 separate immunological components. The pertussis vaccine at the time was a whole-cell bacteria vaccine that had about 3000 separate bacterial proteins, so we both got about 3200 immunological components in our vaccines. My grandchildren today, getting the vaccines for 18 different diseases, get about 180 immunological components… He and I had a greater chance of this overvaccination he warns about than children today.”
Experts warn the public to consider the adverse effects of not vaccinating children, including the conditions that can develop as a result of contracting these diseases.
“We recommend the flu shot for everybody, but what is not often talked about are the severe complications that the flu vaccine prevents,” says Taylor. “I have seen an unvaccinated child hospitalized right now with acute necrotizing encephalitis, a severe neurological condition, which has a 40 percent mortality rate from the flu.”
Many hospitals and medical organizations are rejecting the changes in the schedule due to the lack of new data or evidence surrounding vaccine safety or ineffectiveness. In an email to all its patient care providers, the executive offices of CHOP stated that “CHOP experts continue to emphasize the importance of routine immunization for all children and adolescents and recommend following the American Academy of Pediatrics Immunization Schedule.”
RFK Jr., along with others in the current federal administration, has stated that their goal is to restore public trust in the CDC. “He [RFK Jr.] probably has done more to destroy faith in vaccines in the last 20 years than anyone else as the nation’s leading anti-vaccine activist,” Offit says. “My advice to parents is to not trust him. Listen to your pediatricians.”
“This is a dangerous time, especially for children in this country,” says Offit. “RFK’s war on vaccines is a war on children, and it seems to only be getting worse.”