Federal Vaccine Panel Drops Plan to Reconsider mRNA COVID-19 Shots
Federal vaccine advisers have dropped a plan to reconsider mRNA COVID-19 vaccine recommendations amid Republican concerns about midterm election impacts. The committee maintains its September 2025 decision on shared clinical decision-making.
A key federal vaccine advisory panel has abandoned an effort to reconsider recommendations for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, according to sources familiar with the matter. The shift comes as some Republicans warn that additional changes to vaccine policy could damage the party in the midterm elections.
Some vaccine advisers under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had been seeking to potentially stop recommending mRNA shots, but that plan is no longer moving forward, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
"The committee has not reconsidered its September 2025 decision to classify COVID vaccines under shared clinical decision-making on the CDC immunization schedules," said HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is slated to meet next week and is expected to make recommendations on which vaccines Americans should receive and when.
A panel of vaccine advisers in September last year scrapped a broad recommendation for COVID shots and said that COVID-19 shots should be administered only through shared decision-making with a healthcare provider.
Under the leadership of Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, the HHS decided in August last year to wind down mRNA vaccine development activities under its biomedical research unit. The mRNA vaccines, produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, do not contain weakened or inactivated viruses, and instead give cells instructions to make a protein component of the virus, prompting the body to build immunity.