Two experts answer key questions about the recent COVID-19 vaccine guideline changes. Image credit: MR.WUTTISAK PROMCHOO/Getty Images.

On May 27, 2025, the United States Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a social media post that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer be recommending COVID-19 vaccination to pregnant individuals or healthy children.

The announcement came shortly after another statement published by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), which suggested that COVID-19 immunization programmes should, going forward, focus on older adults and those at high risk of developing severe disease, should they become infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

These changes to the official immunization schedule have spurred questions and caused some concern, particularly as a new, more transmissible variant of SARS-CoV-2, called NB.1.8.1, has emerged in the U.S.

Medical News Today has spoken to Daniel Ganjian, MD, FAAP, board certified pediatrician at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, and Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, to answer the most pressing questions.

How do the new guidelines affect pregnant people?

One concern when it comes to the potential impact on pregnant people is that a lack of access to COVID-19 vaccination might actually increase the risk of pregnancy complications.

“If COVID-19 vaccines are no longer recommended for pregnant individuals, pregnant individuals would lose a key intervention that reduces their risk of severe COVID-19, ICU [intensive care unit] admission, preterm birth, and perinatal death,” Ganjian told MNT.

“[Currently,] the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and [previously] the Centers for Disease Control and PreventionTrusted Source have all recommended COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy due to these risks,” he noted.

In a similar vein, Gandhi emphasized:

“Although I completely agree that the people most in need of booster COVID-19 shots ever year are those who are older (65 years or older) and those [who are] immunocompromise[d] or [have] multiple medical conditions, pregnant women are actually relatively immunocompromised and so are at risk of severe COVID-19.”

“So, I would have preferred that the guidance did not name healthy pregnant women as not needing the shot,” she told us.”