The latest COVID-19, flu and RSV vaccines remain very safe and highly effective for protecting people against severe complications from the potentially life-threatening respiratory viruses, according to independent analyses released Wednesday. As a result, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Family Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America simultaneously issued guidelines recommending Americans continue to get immunized. For stories on the science of healthy living, subscribe to NPR's Health newsletter.
The advice aims to fill the void created by the failure of the Trump administration to issue updated recommendations for how Americans should use the vaccines to best protect themselves against these respiratory illnesses. The groups continue to recommend the vaccines more broadly than the Trump administration. For example, they recommend routine COVID vaccines for healthy younger adults, young children and pregnant people.
Current federal advice doesn't recommend those groups routinely get vaccinated. "Unfortunately today, the federal government is not fulfilling that responsibility in the way that it historically has. But the need for that work has not disappeared," said Bruce Gelin of the Vaccine Integrity Project, an independent initiative based at the University of Minnesota, to counter questions being raised about vaccines by the Trump administration.
"We cannot allow the breakdown of the federal process to create a vacuum in evidence-based vaccine guidance." The analyses of the COVID, RSV and flu immunizations come as the newest versions of the vaccines are starting to become available. Meanwhile, flu and COVID infections are on the rise, students are returning to school, and the fall and winter respiratory season is approaching. "Americans are hearing conflicting messages about vaccines right now, and it's understandable that people are asking whom they should trust," Gelin told reporters at a briefing before the new research and updated guidelines were released publicly.
"Americans should have access to the best available scientific evidence." In a typical year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have issued updated guidelines for how immunizations should be best used to fight the infections. But the CDC's process for issuing those guidelines was frozen by a lawsuit that blocked the Trump administration's efforts to reduce the number of vaccines children routinely receive. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine critic, tried to cut the number of federally recommended routine vaccines, a move Trump recently tried to revive. Trump and Kennedy claim children get too many vaccines at the same time and that those immunizations are linked to autism. Most doctors, public health authorities and infectious disease experts strongly dispute that, arguing that vaccines are very safe and highly effective.
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