CDC vaccine committee drops push to stop recommending mRNA Covid-19 shots, for now

By Adam Cancryn, Brenda Goodman, CNN

(CNN) — A group of experts that advises the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on its vaccine recommendations has suspended an anticipated push to stop recommending mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines amid growing concerns inside the Trump administration over its political risks, people familiar with the matter told CNN on Wednesday.

The move comes as polling shows that Americans – even voters who favor the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement – strongly support vaccines. There’s increasing concern among Republicans that further attacks on vaccines will harm the party’s chances in November, and the White House has pushed health officials to focus on more politically appealing issues ahead of the midterm elections.

The plan to stop recommending mRNA Covid shots has been shelved only for the time being, according to the people familiar, and could be still revived at some point in the coming months.

A spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday that the CDC’s committee “has not reconsidered its September 2025 decision to classify COVID vaccines under shared clinical decision-making on the CDC immunization schedules.”

The news was first reported by the Washington Post.

Vaccines against the coronavirus, which caused a deadly worldwide pandemic in 2020, were developed in record time under the aegis of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. They are credited with saving millions of lives.

The vaccines, which were delivered in less than a year, for the first time utilized mRNA technology, which had been painstakingly developed over 50 years of public and private research. The shots from drugmakers Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna were initially tested in double-blind, placebo-controlled trials involving more than 70,000 people.

Still, the Covid-19 vaccines and their mRNA technology, which is also being studied for cancer and other immunization, have become the focus of conspiracy theories. In August, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled half a billion dollars’ worth of federal funding for mRNA vaccine projects and said “no new mRNA-based projects would be initiated,” potentially hindering the nation’s ability to respond quickly in the event of another pandemic.

Several members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — all of them handpicked by Kennedy after he removed the previous members last year — have attacked the Covid-19 vaccines, claiming without credible evidence that they’re responsible for more injuries than the infection itself.

A coalition of anti-vaccine groups who are aligned with Kennedy – including The Highwire, a podcast produced by the Informed Consent Action Network and hosted by Del Bigtree, who was Kennedy’s communications director during his 2024 presidential campaign and Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit Kennedy helmed before running for office – has been broadcasting messages on social media urging people to submit comments about their vaccine injuries and suggesting that the meeting would review “politically explosive” vaccine injury data. They also suggest that many people with long Covid symptoms actually have vaccine injuries.

“I’m not deaf to the calls that we need to get the Covid vaccine mRNA products off the market,” ACIP member Dr. Robert Malone said on the MAHA Action podcast in January.

“All I can say is, stay tuned and wait for the upcoming ACIP meeting. If the FDA won’t act, there are other entities that will,” Malone said. He has also written about how he “almost died” after his second Covid-19 shot in 2021.

Dr. Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at MIT who is leading ACIP’s work group on Covid-19 vaccines, posted online in 2023, “The evidence is mounting and indisputable that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people. We have to stop giving them immediately!”

Levi is also the co-author of several studies on the Covid-19 vaccines that critics say rely on flawed methods to claim that the vaccines have caused widespread harm.

ACIP’s votes determine insurance coverage for vaccines and access to the shots for low-income families.

The committee had been scheduled to meet in February, but that session was abruptly canceled a week beforehand.

The Federal Register notice for its next meeting, which is set for March 18 and 19, indicates that the committee has planned votes on Covid-19 vaccine injuries and long Covid. The notice also says that “agenda items are subject to change as priorities dictate.” The official agenda for the meeting has not been released.

That meeting could also be canceled, however, if a federal judge rules on a request from several professional groups to prevent the committee from convening.

At its meeting in September, the committee voted to change the CDC’s recommendation that all eligible Americans 6 months and older get updated Covid-19 vaccines to a recommendation based on shared clinical decision-making, which requires a conversation with and sometimes a prescription from a health care provider. Shared clinical decision-making recommendations keep vaccines available but make them more complicated to get, since they require more steps than a general recommendation.

Continued attacks on vaccines by ACIP, which has historically made expert recommendations on the use of vaccines in the United States, have undermined its influence. Many states had previously adopted the panel’s vaccine recommendations as their own, but some 30 states now rely on a source other than the CDC for their recommendations, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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