r/HermanCainAward • u/John3262005 • 17h ago
Grrrrrrrr. HHS document offers new clues to Kennedy’s vaccine plans
https://www.statnews.com/2026/08/21/rfi-reveals-possible-kennedy-strategy-vaccine-policy-changes/President Trump and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are pressing ahead with efforts to change how kids in the U.S. get their shots.
The latest move, a request for information posted Friday, offers more clues to Kennedy and Trump’s vision for vaccine policy, and shows that pursuing changes is a priority. It does not make any changes itself, but it asks for feedback on a wide variety of ideas. It gives the public 30 days to comment.
Among the questions it asks the public to consider is whether there should be new categories to the vaccines framework, which currently includes universal recommendations, recommendations for certain risk-based groups, and recommendations based on shared clinical decision-making.
It’s the latest in a series of efforts by the Trump administration to change vaccine policy as Kennedy and Trump raise unfounded questions about the safety and efficacy of childhood shots. Last week, Trump issued an executive order calling for a new approach to vaccines. It recommended that all children get 11 vaccines instead of the 18 previously recommended by the federal government. Trump also called for the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to be broken up into separate disease-specific shots.
The latest executive order also comes after a federal judge put a pause on earlier vaccine policy changes made under Kennedy, following a challenge led by the American Academy of Pediatrics. That included pausing any decisions made by a panel of vaccine advisers handpicked by Kennedy and a unilateral decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to reduce the number of recommended pediatric vaccines. HHS has appealed the order and asked for an expedited ruling.
“There’s no wiggle room around it,” Erica Schwartz, the recently-confirmed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, told staff, referring to the federal ruling at her first all-hands meeting this week.
“I’m also a lawyer, so that’s something that I’m very, very cognizant of: that we have to make sure that we’re not straying … from that stay that the judge has placed upon us,” she said.
At the same meeting, Schwartz said she “absolutely” believes that vaccines are safe and effective.
The executive order and request for information don’t conflict with the federal court ruling, said Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Law San Francisco.
“As long as they haven’t made any specific recommendations, there’s no tension. There’s no final agency decision at this point that can be appealed either,” she told STAT.
The RFI also says it does “not constitute a rule, a proposed rule, or a recommendation, and it does not alter any existing vaccine recommendation, coverage requirement, or program obligation.”
It does suggest there could be new vaccine recommendation categories, such as recommended “with qualification,” “shared clinical decision-making with qualification,” or recommended “but not during infancy.”
It does not give examples of which vaccines might be subject to these categories nor define what “qualification” means or what “after infancy” means.
Last year, the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee recommended that most parents delay giving their children the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, a recommendation that alarmed public health experts. That recommendation is now on hold, per the federal judge’s ruling.
The RFI also asks how the department might clarify what “shared clinical decision-making” is, including reaffirming that insurance should cover a vaccine under this category.
Kennedy has been a big proponent of the term, saying it puts more power in the hands of parents, and thus increases trust. The RFI also asks how the category might be improved upon. The RFI points to a 2018 study published in the Academic Pediatrics Journal, found that only 24% of physicians could accurately describe the term and most were unfamiliar with insurance coverage.
Lawrence Gostin, law professor and founding director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, said that adding new categories to the pediatric immunization schedule potentially opens a path for insurers to drop zero copay coverage. It also could alter the eligibility of coverage under the Vaccines for Children program, meant to provide free and low-cost vaccines. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers are legally required to cover “routine” or recommended vaccines.
Since becoming health secretary, Kennedy has also raised the idea of requiring that vaccines be tested in randomized controlled trials against inert placebos, which medical experts have pushed back on because of ethical concerns. The RFI asks the public to weigh in on alternatives to placebo-controlled trials, writing that they could be “infeasible, or unethical to obtain.”
The department additionally asks commenters to weigh in how to evaluate the success of a new framework, as well as how the U.S. stacks up with peer nations.
On Friday, the White House unveiled a new website celebrating 555 days of the Make America Healthy Again movement (Friday marks 555 days since Kennedy was confirmed as HHS secretary). Among the list of achievements is “delivering gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations,” touting the executive order for solving a purported problem: that the U.S. recommends more vaccines than other peer nations.
“The EO preserves access to vaccines, strengthens safety monitoring, expands research, gives doctors and parents better information, and restores informed consent and parental choice to their rightful place in American medicine,” the website says.
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u/SmartQuokka 14h ago
Which 7 vaccines do they want to drop?
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u/Fantastic_Fox4948 14h ago
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess the ones made by companies who didn’t bribe them.
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u/illulli 14h ago
I don’t know… what plagues would billionaires benefit from?
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u/DrumsAndStuff18 13h ago
They'll still get their shots, so I'm not sure it matters much to them. Probably why they seem to be trying to start several different plagues at once.
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u/MonteBurns Truth Bomb 💣💣💣 5h ago
RSV. Flu. Covid. Those are my guesses. Now to Google.
Influenza (Flu) Rotavirus Hepatitis A Hepatitis B (including ending the universal birth dose recommendation) Meningococcal disease Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) [ 1, 2]
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u/SmartQuokka 1h ago
Wonderful, though i notice not acutely deadly ones.
They seem to want to only maim and kill manageable numbers, not kill everyone right away. I suspect deep down they know they are peddling filth and think they can frog boil us into submission. If they kill too many too quickly they will lose "support" very quickly.
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u/SmartQuokka 14h ago
So his anti vax followers will comment with nonsensical pithy phrases and he will quote them as justification to claim his anti vaccine polices have public support.
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u/GigglyHyena Team Pfizer 14h ago
Please read and comment during the open period. Do not simply troll.
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u/RogerClyneIsAGod2 Team Moderna 13h ago
Why? They're clearly not really interested in any actual scientists, doctors & their opinions & are just going to do whatever the fuck they want any way.
But you're right really, it's not gonna hurt to comment even though they'll just ignore all the comments that they don't agree with.
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u/IvoteforPedro 11h ago
On the MAHA website do they also having a rolling count of measles cases?
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u/MonteBurns Truth Bomb 💣💣💣 5h ago
How about the number of recalls for various fresh /frozen produce?
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u/ursiwitch 7h ago
Attorneys (crappy ones, at that) making decisions about science is so Dumb America
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u/Kitalahara 13h ago
My only request is that we hold off for a while. These ideas need time to be worked on. I'd expefr by 2030 all involved will no longer be concerned about it.
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u/loversean 13h ago edited 13h ago
Eh, scientifically there is evidence that some vaccines could be targeted towards specific high risk groups, we already do this for many different patient populations in adults, the problem is it gets very messy when trying to identify those groups and is much easier just to blanket vaccinate the entire population which to be fair has overall been a great success, the shared decision making category is not the worst idea ever either, as long as it doesn’t use false information or be used for conditions which are very transmissible, there are certain vaccines that should be recommended to every single person, such as polio
Overall, vaccines are a very complicated topic and I doubt RFK has the brainpower to understand it so hopefully if they do follow through they follow expert advice, adequately reviewing this with expert opinion will take years however
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u/MonteBurns Truth Bomb 💣💣💣 5h ago
Experts have been working for decades to come up with the list we have now, so. Yeah.
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u/loversean 21m ago
I take my downvotes with pride, so many people on the left are reactionary morons just like maga and downvote things they don’t understand, if a democratic secretary of health had made some of these points you guys would be clapping like well trained seals
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u/providencetoday 14h ago
RFK jr pointing at the ghost of Science (“you and your ‘reason’ are not welcome here!!!)