Washington — It may be a “better thing” if fewer children receive the flu vaccine, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told CBS News, after the Trump administration announced sweeping changes to childhood vaccine recommendations.
This week, the Centers for Disease Control announced vaccines to fight respiratory syncytial virus, meningococcal disease, flu, and COVID are now recommended only for children at high risk of serious illness or after consultation between doctors and parents, as a part of the CDC’s scaling back of key childhood vaccination recommendations. Until recently, the CDC recommended that everyone 6 months and older get the annual flu vaccine.
In an interview with CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes, Kennedy insisted, “We’re not taking vaccines away from anybody. If you want to get the vaccine, you can get it. It’s gonna be fully covered by insurance, just like it was before.”
Kennedy did concede there is now an added step to getting children the flu vaccine, as it requires consultation with a physician first, rather than it being freely administered at a pharmacy.
“You have to, yeah, you need to do shared decision making with your physician, which is how it ought to be,” Kennedy said.
“So fewer people will get the flu vaccine?” Cordes asked.
“Well, that may be, and maybe that’s a better thing,” Kennedy said.
“Based on what evidence?” Cordes pressed. “There are 280, 290 kids who died last year due to the flu. There’s no evidence that any kids died or were harmed due to the flu vaccine. So isn’t this inevitably going to lead to more children dying?”
Kennedy said the Cochrane Collaboration, a U.K.-based health care research nonprofit that he called “one of the ultimate arbiters of vaccine safety and clinical data,” has done an extensive meta-review of the flu vaccine. Kennedy said they found “there is no evidence that the flu vaccine prevents serious disease or that it prevents hospitalizations or death in children.”
But that isn’t regarded by the medical community as the only authority on vaccines, and the CDC as recently as last year touted other studies that found the flu vaccine significantly reduced a child’s risk of dying from the flu and reduced the risk of an intensive care hospital stay.
Cordes noted that roughly 90% of kids who died from the flu in 2024 weren’t vaccinated against the flu, according to CDC data.
“There is no scientific evidence that the flu vaccine prevents serious illness, hospitalizations, or death in children,” Kennedy responded.
More of this interview will air on “CBS Evening News” tonight with Tony Dokoupil.
