Ruth Jones, immunization nurse, holds a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (brand name: Comirnaty) at Borinquen Health Care Center in Miami, Florida, on May 29, 2025.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Covid shot access and coverage within the U.S. hang within the balance as an influential government vaccine panel hand-picked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. convenes this week in Atlanta.
The panel, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, is scheduled to vote on recommendations for Covid jabs and childhood immunizations for hepatitis B and measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella, or MMRV. Kennedy has gutted and restacked that committee with latest members, a few of whom are vaccine critics, raising concerns that they may soften, delay or fully eliminate recommendations for routine shots proven to be protected and effective.
The panel is anticipated to vote on the hepatitis B and MMRV shot on Thursday, and Covid vaccines on Friday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose latest director was ousted by the Trump administration earlier this month, typically adopts the panel’s recommendations.
Some public health experts warn that weakening recommendations for Covid vaccines and other shots could make it harder for some people — especially healthy adults and youngsters, together with those in rural areas — to access the jabs and have them covered by insurance.
One major medical insurance group on Wednesday said its member plans will cover all vaccines already advisable by ACIP, including updated Covid and flu shots, despite any changes the brand new slate of appointees makes this week.
Still, any further restrictions on shots by ACIP could have trickle-down effects, further depressing already declining immunization rates for vaccine-preventable diseases and raising the danger of outbreaks.
“There’s a reasonably good likelihood that the selections coming out of this meeting will further restrict vaccinations or at a minimum, limit or add confusion to the scope of vaccination coverage at a time after we really must be doing all the things possible to make them as widely available as possible,” Neil Maniar, a public health professor at Northeastern University, told CNBC. “There’s a whole lot of concern that we could see unnecessary outbreaks of diseases.”
Maniar said the votes are especially critical heading into the autumn and winter season, when diseases, particularly respiratory viruses like Covid, spread more easily.
The panel’s guidance determines which shots insurance coverage and a few government-run programs must cover for free of charge to patients. In some states, pharmacists are also legally barred from administering vaccines that ACIP doesn’t recommend.
If ACIP votes to further restrict shot access, it could normalize policy decisions not grounded in science and further confuse Americans following Kennedy’s other recent moves to alter U.S. vaccine policy. Those include the CDC’s decision to drop Covid shot recommendations for healthy kids and pregnant women, and the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of recent Covid jabs with limits on who can get them.
The FDA’s approval already created confusion leading as much as the panel’s meeting this week, as some states are requiring that patients have prescriptions to receive a Covid vaccine.
Quite a few studies have demonstrated that shots using mRNA technology, including Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, are protected and effective, and serious unwanted effects have happened in extremely rare cases. One paper in August estimates that Covid vaccines saved greater than 2 million lives, mostly amongst older adults, worldwide between 2020 and October 2024.
“To show around and claim, well, after five years of all of us getting the vaccines and having them save hundreds of thousands of lives all around the world, the shots are not any longer protected and effective – it does result in confusion and uncertainty,” said Dr. Kawsar Talaat, associate professor of international health on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“People do not know who to trust and who to take heed to, and subsequently individuals are less more likely to feel comfortable getting the vaccines that might keep them healthy.”
Covid vaccines in focus
Kennedy has insisted that “anybody” who wants a Covid vaccine can get one, despite several reports and statements from lawmakers describing obstacles. Those hurdles cropped up after the FDA in August approved Covid shots for those 65 and up and younger adults with at the very least one underlying condition that puts them at higher risk of severe illness from the virus.
It was a break from U.S. vaccine policy in previous years, which advisable an annual Covid shot for all Americans 6 months and up.
The CDC panel could tailor its recommendations to the FDA’s approval, or further limit their use, given many members are hostile to mRNA shots and vaccines more broadly. One member, Retsef Levi, has pushed to stop giving mRNA vaccines, falsely claiming in a post on X that they cause “serious harm including death, especially amongst young people.”
It’s unclear what exact data might be presented on the meeting on Friday, but some health experts are concerned about whether the presentations might be based on concrete science. One presentation presented to the panel in June included a fabricated citation for a study that doesn’t exist, in accordance with multiple reports.
“I believe it’s really essential to see who’s speaking on the meeting and what their agenda is,” Talaat said. “There have been made-up studies and just falsehoods presented on the last ACIP meeting. I might not be surprised to see similar things at this one.”
The Washington Post reported Friday that Trump administration health officials plan to link Covid vaccines to the deaths of 25 children in a presentation to ACIP. The claim is anticipated to be based on reports submitted to the FDA’s Vaccine Antagonistic Event Reporting System, or VAERS, which collects unverified unwanted effects from shots.
Researchers have previously noted an elevated but rare risk of myocarditis, or inflamed heart muscle, in young men specifically. But there isn’t a evidence that the vaccines in use now cause every other major safety risks, including pediatric deaths.
Kennedy in September argued that “there is no clinical data” supporting Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy individuals.
Talaat said healthy individuals are less more likely to find yourself within the hospital from Covid. But she noted they may still develop long Covid or put high-risk people around them – whether that be elderly relations or immunocompromised coworkers – prone to contracting the virus and developing severe illness.
Access could vary by state
If ACIP moves to weaken Covid shot recommendations, access could vary by state, in accordance with Talaat.
On Wednesday, the governors of Oregon, Washington, California and Hawaii advisable that every one adults and youngsters concerned in regards to the respiratory illness season can receive the Covid vaccine and other common immunizations. The updated guidelines in those states align with mainstream medical groups and aim to make sure access to shots at the same time as the federal government changes guidelines.
Governors of several Democratic states, including Arizona, Illinois, Maine and North Carolina, have also signed orders intended to make sure most residents can receive Covid vaccines at pharmacies without individual prescriptions.
Some states, particularly those led by Republicans, still require a health care provider’s orders.
Talaat said the people who find themselves “going to suffer essentially the most” are those that live in rural areas because they could not have quick access to a health care provider who can provide a prescription or a pharmacy to receive a shot.
But recommendations that further limit Covid shots could also force some children and adults to pay out of pocket for them. Talaat and some estimates said greater than half of kids within the U.S. are covered by the government-run Vaccines for Children program, which offers advisable shots without cost.
Medicare and Medicaid require that the advisable vaccines are free for patients, while the Inexpensive Care Act requires private insurers to cover all shots advisable by the panel and the CDC director.
America’s Health Insurance Plans’ pledge on Wednesday to cover shots currently advisable by ACIP was significant due to the dimensions of its member plans, which together provide coverage and services to over 200 million Americans. That features greater than a dozen Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, Centene, CVS‘s Aetna, Elevance Health, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, Molina, and Cigna.
However the group doesn’t cover everyone. For instance, UnitedHealthcare, the country’s largest private health insurer, will not be a member of the group.
Hepatitis B, MMRV shots
ACIP on Thursday could reconsider a longstanding advice to offer all newborns a dose of the hepatitis B vaccine throughout the first 24 hours of life, which the panel first advisable in 1991. Kennedy and anti-vaccine activists have repeatedly questioned that guidance.
However the shot has been a life-saving public health intervention against the disease, which might result in severe health problems, including liver cancer and failure, and death. Acute hepatitis B infections reported amongst children and teenagers dropped by 99% between 1990 and 2019, some studies said.
The vaccines are estimated to prevented 38 million deaths amongst people born between 2000 and 2030 in 98 low and middle-income countries, in accordance with the CDC. The agency said vaccination throughout the first day of birth, followed by two-to-three additional doses, protects children for all times.
The panel is anticipated to vote to recommend delaying the hepatitis B vaccine until age 4, two former senior CDC officials told KFF Health News.
Talaat said global rates of hepatitis B in children have fallen because of the initial “birth dose” of the shot. While the U.S. now has low levels of the virus, skipping that dose carries risks: a mother can still pass the infection to her baby at birth, and newborns are way more more likely to develop a lifelong, incurable infection.
Meanwhile, ACIP Chair Martin Kulldorff said on the panel’s June meeting that it might consider a proposal to advise against giving a product that mixes the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with the shot against varicella, or chicken pox, to children under 4.
The CDC currently recommends getting those vaccines individually for those ages 1 to 2, but parents can opt to get them together for kids age 4 and above.
Fever-induced seizures tied to the mixture shot are common in young children – the CDC estimates the danger is at roughly 5% – but don’t cause everlasting harm.
Significant changes made to the schedule or availability of MMRV shots could end in increased hesitancy amongst parents to get their children vaccinated. The U.S. already surpassed a milestone in reported measles cases in 2025, because it logged essentially the most cases because the disease was declared eliminated within the U.S.
