US plan to abandon some childhood vaccines to align with Denmark will put children at risk, experts say

US plan to abandon some childhood vaccines to align with Denmark will put children at risk, experts say

By Lauren J. Young & Tanya Lewis edited by Claire Cameron

The United States reportedly intends to revise its childhood vaccination schedule. The move, first reported by CNN, would change how many vaccines are intended to protect children against various diseases and when they receive those shots.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, is a long-time vaccine skeptic and supports changing the vaccination schedule. Recommendations for several vaccines currently routinely given to children in the United States, including rotavirus, varicella (chickenpox), hepatitis A, meningococcal bacteria, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), could be scrapped entirely under these plans, according to CNN.

Childhood vaccines collectively protect children and the U.S. population as a whole from diseases, such as measles and hepatitis B, that sicken, hospitalize, or kill hundreds or thousands of people each year. Currently, children in the United States are recommended vaccines for 18 diseases, compared to 10 in Denmark.

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Changing the vaccines children receive would be “a terrible mistake,” says Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Defend Public Health, an all-volunteer, nonprofit-sponsored organization. As a result, more children could get sick and die from preventable diseases.

RSV, for example, is the leading cause of infant hospitalization, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the United States, between 58,000 and 80,000 children under the age of five are hospitalized each year due to the disease. The two available shots, which are not technically vaccines but antibody drugs that protect against RSV, were approved in 2023 and 2025 and are more than 90% effective in protecting against hospitalization. Most of the vaccines that would be targeted for withdrawal are those that were approved more recently, notes Malaty Rivera.

People have an arbitrary array of “old-school” vaccines, such as those for polio and measles, and “new-school” vaccines, such as those for chickenpox and human papillomavirus (HPV), says Malaty Rivera. But these new vaccines have been around for decades and have been shown to be very effective, she says.

The Trump administration has previously said it wants to model U.S. vaccine policy after that of other developed countries and particularly Denmark, which recommends fewer vaccines than the United States and recommends them at different times of life. The comparison was at the heart of discussions at the latest meeting of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee. But it doesn’t make sense to compare the United States to countries like Denmark, which have a very different health care system.

Such a comparison is “not apples to oranges, but apples to steaks,” says Malaty Rivera. “I cannot underestimate the value of universal health care and the highly organized health care infrastructure” in Denmark.

“We can learn a lot from some studies done in other countries, but we need to use critical thinking to determine what is applicable to our context and what is not,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University.

A key difference between the United States and Denmark that Kennedy and other U.S. health officials appear to avoid is that the European country has a national health system that covers everyone for free, unlike the United States.

“Denmark or other countries have universal health coverage that allows people to not fall into gaps in health care like they do in the United States. The reality of our health care system is that people fall into gaps,” says Nuzzo.

In the United States, a change in the vaccination schedule would also affect who can get vaccinated. Whatever the CDC recommends influences what private health insurers will cover and which federal programs, such as the Vaccines for Children program, will subsidize.

“When changes are made to the schedule, it will impact who can get vaccinated, whether you like it or not,” says Nuzzo. “It’s not about letting you opt out. It’s about making it harder for you to opt out.”

The plan could still change, according to CNN. The Department of Health and Human Services had planned a news conference on children’s health for Friday, but has since pushed the announcement back until next year.

If these new changes come to fruition, they will weaken collective protection against deadly infectious diseases, Nuzzo says. Individual health care providers and states can step in to preserve access to vaccines, but people could still fall through the cracks of an increasingly disparate public health system.

“We need to make public health recommendations that work for everyone. There are clearly people who can’t spend the majority of their time trying to find credible sources of information,” Nuzzo says. “I worry about people who simply won’t get the life-saving protection they need.”

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