The country’s top vaccine advisors are meeting for the last time in 2025 right at this very moment. When they break tomorrow, many experts say, the nation’s children will likely be down at least one more vaccine, this time for Hepatitis B, which can be deadly in infants.
The CDC’s recent deletion of the COVID-19 vaccine from the childhood immunization schedule has sowed chaos and confusion that coincides with a general decline in vaccine uptake that risks large outbreaks of potentially fatal diseases among children.
These changes and others at the Department of Health and Human Services are also upending federal and state-level health care structures, especially for children. For instance, California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii have formed a vaccine alliance that will issue its own guidelines. First Focus on Children policy staffers Maxwell R. Rowshandel and Averi Pakulis unpack the future of childhood vaccines in this new article.
This upheaval in childhood vaccines has real-life consequences for the country’s children. So do the Trump Administration’s many other deliberate, destructive attempts to fracture the children’s health care landscape.
For instance, the state of Mississippi has declared infant deaths a public health emergency, yet the Administration has forced it to stop gathering data for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (Prams), according to a news report, a national database that reportedly has guided policymaking on maternal and infant health for nearly four decades. The program is a partnership between state-level health officials and a “little-known but influential” CDC agency called the Division of Reproductive Health, the report said, which has lost most of its staff – nearly 100 people – in the Trump Administration’s purges of federal workers.
It was also this Administration that killed a pediatric cancer bill. And, of course, it is this Administration that will cut Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program by $1 trillion, the largest cuts in the history of the programs — so that billionaires can receive bigger tax breaks.
The Administration’s most recent report, Make Our Children Healthy Again, perfectly captures the cynicism and contempt in which President Trump and his officials hold America’s children and the people who love them. First Focus on Children President Bruce Lesley summed it up, saying about the report:
“Tragically, the performative words seek to obscure a hollow framework: one that undermines trust in public health institutions, shifts focus from proven programs to ideological reinterpretation, distracts from real investment in children’s well-being, and fails to achieve the previously stated purposes, which is to make children healthy and protect children from harm, including nicotine and toxic pesticides.”