In an abrupt move this week, the federal government announced it is removing COVID-19 vaccines from the list of shots recommended for healthy kids and pregnant women.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered the policy change through a video posted on the social media platform X, stating, “We’re now one step closer to realizing President Trump’s promise to make America healthy again.”

Dr. Meg Fisher, a noted pediatric infectious disease specialist in New Jersey, spoke about the latest recommendation and its implications.

“As far as I can tell, this decision to limit the COVID vaccine access was made without any input from pediatricians, without any input from obstetricians and gynecologists, truly without expert opinion,” Fisher said.

She and others have said the decision breaks with previous expert guidance and bypasses the panel of advisors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who would normally vote on changes to immunizations. Public health experts in New Jersey also point to this past winter as a reason for concern, where roughly 11,000 children were hospitalized with a COVID-19 infection. The majority were under the age of five.

Fisher said the decision will make it harder for pregnant women and children to get vaccinated against the virus, because insurance companies will likely no longer pay for them.

“If the FDA would go so far as to not license the vaccine, except for at-risk people, then that would greatly limit access,” said Fisher. “If they don’t do that … it’s likely that people would have access to the vaccine, but they probably would have to pay for it themselves.”

Fisher said she and other medical professionals are unclear about what guidelines the federal government is using to determine a “healthy” child. More than 1.2 million people have died in the U.S. from COVID-19, most of them elderly. But children haven’t been spared. The coronavirus has been the underlying cause in more than 1,300 childhood deaths since the pandemic began, according to CDC data.

In Europe, COVID-19 vaccines are approved for anyone 6 months and older, but many countries also don’t recommend them for healthy kids under the age of 5.

“Many countries decided to go on a risk-based recommendation, and in fact, when this was discussed at the last advisory committee on immunization practices meeting, that’s exactly what they were talking about,” said Fisher. “However, that was with all of the information, the scientific evidence and input from the experts.”