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Well|The C.D.C. Now Says Healthy Kids Don’t Need Covid Shots. Is That True?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/well/rfk-jr-cdc-children-covid-vaccines-data.html
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Here’s what the data tells us about Covid’s risks to children — and the benefits of vaccination.
May 27, 2025, 12:42 p.m. ET
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer advise that healthy children receive routine Covid shots, a significant departure from its previous approach of suggesting annual shots for everyone age 6 months and older.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the change on X on Tuesday, citing a lack of data to support shots for healthy children. The move echoes his longstanding skepticism about the need to vaccinate children against the virus. Mr. Kennedy, who as health secretary oversees the C.D.C., has repeatedly said that children are at almost no risk from Covid.
It’s true that for many children, a case of Covid will be inconsequential. They might have a runny nose, a cough or other mild symptoms, if any at all, and bounce back within a few days. But some children do become seriously ill and, in rare cases, die from their infections. And data shows that over one million U.S. children have developed long Covid.
That discrepancy is at the root of a continuing debate among medical researchers about just how much of a risk Covid poses to children, and whether they should receive annual vaccines against it.
Many agree that the original course of vaccination offered significant protection against serious illness in children. Data from the C.D.C. shows that two or more doses of Covid vaccines were 40 percent effective at preventing emergency room visits and hospitalizations among children under the age of 5.
But the question of whether children need annual vaccines to protect against the latest circulating variants is more contentious. Children might not benefit as much as adults would from a yearly shot because their immune systems can remember vaccinations for much longer, said Dr. Michael Mina, a former professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has extensively studied Covid. Another argument against annual shots is that most children in the United States now have some degree of protection from previous infections or vaccinations.
