Parents, Doctors Left in the Dark Amid Trump Admin’s Obscure Guidelines on Childhood Vaccines
Dr. Jessica Weisz, a pediatrician in Washington, has seen more and more parents skeptical about vaccinating their children. She cares for about 15 families a day and said questions that used to be monthly about vaccine safety have become weekly.
But, she emphasizes, this is not yet the norm.
“The vast majority of parents and guardians want their children to be vaccinated,” Weisz, who is also president of the D.C. chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), told TPM.
Last Friday, the Washington Post published an article describing plans for new childhood vaccine guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services. The guidelines would recommend fewer vaccines and encourage a “shared clinical decision-making” model that calls for parents and doctors to discuss guidelines for most shots in the absence of clear guidance from the federal government. The United States plans to follow a vaccination schedule similar to Denmark.
Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesman, did not confirm these plans in a comment to the Washington Post. “Unless you hear it directly from HHS, it’s just pure speculation,” Nixon told the Post. But in 2025, federal health agencies have repeatedly scaled back their vaccine recommendations while federal officials publicly questioned their effectiveness.
The competing narratives — medical professionals largely support decades of science supporting vaccine safety, while President Donald Trump’s federal government does not — create a confusing environment that ultimately shifts long-standing medical recommendation practices from the federal government to parents, individual practitioners and medical associations.
“The kinds of statements coming out of our health officials are unlike anything we’ve seen in recent U.S. vaccination history,” said Jason Schwartz, an associate professor of health policy at Yale. “And all of this will undoubtedly worry parents.”
After a piecemeal attack on childhood vaccines, the federal government’s planned new guidance focuses scientific recommendations in a way that health professionals who spoke to TPM fear will harm children, confuse parents, burden health care providers, and create unpredictable ripple effects impacting vaccine manufacturers and insurance coverage.
“If we move our policy away from a standardized vaccination schedule, it will affect who needs vaccines, to what extent [vaccine manufacturers] do, who pays for it, [and] is it universally accessible to everyone,” Weisz said.
For months, rumors have been circulating about official changes by HHS to the childhood immunization schedule. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaxxer, in June expelled all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine panel, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, and installed his own followers. These new members began changing vaccination schedules and recommendations, eliminating clarity where they did not outright deny recommended vaccinations and sowing distrust in vaccine safety. In November, the CDC stunned the medical and research community by updating a web page on autism and vaccines to imply that vaccines can cause autism, a claim that has been completely debunked.
The page, updated November 19, lists key points including: “The claim that ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim” and “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
At the time, a large number of medical professional organizations refuted the government’s claims. More than three dozen organizations issued a joint statement denouncing the use of “taxpayer-funded health agencies” to “spread harmful rumors.”
“The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There is no link between vaccines and autism,” Dr. Susan J. Kressly, AAP national president, said in a statement.
Then, in early December, the ACIP voted to rescind hepatitis B vaccination recommendations for newborns, reversing a policy that had been in place for more than 30 years.
“I think it’s going to be dangerous in terms of the fallout for pediatric vaccines,” Arthur Caplan, a renowned bioethicist and founding director of the division of medical ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told TPM.
“Parents are made nervous when what they view as trusted government authorities start attacking this timeline and raising false concerns about the risks,” Caplan said. “A lot of people just see the CDC or HHS and say, ‘I trust that.’
Schwartz, who specifically studies vaccine policy, described an environment in which well-meaning parents who want to do what’s best for their child’s health are driving blind, with competing medical claims made by various authority figures.
“It’s really important to remember that the vast majority of parents who are faced with decisions about vaccinating their children do not have deeply held, strong beliefs questioning the safety of vaccines,” Schwartz told TPM. “Instead, they’re trying to figure out how to navigate this seemingly contested landscape.”
Most parents aren’t partisan, Schwartz said, but don’t have as much confidence in the safety of vaccines for their children because of federal policy changes. And the CDC’s new emphasis on a shared clinical decision-making model, Schwartz said, falsely implies that pediatricians weren’t already talking to parents about vaccine choices and will likely take more time from doctors’ already busy schedules.
Caplan is part of a yet-to-be-published study in which researchers find that Kennedy’s unsubstantiated claims from September linking Tylenol to autism have already led “a significant number” of pregnant women to reduce their use of the over-the-counter drug.
“I may think Kennedy is a crackpot and a chronic liar, but that doesn’t mean that’s how his messages are perceived by many Americans,” Caplan said.
Yet, as Weisz’s anecdotal evidence from patients in the liberal area DMV suggests, survey after survey has continued to show that more parents than not still trust the safety of childhood vaccinations.
An October survey of more than 2,700 parents by KFF and the Washington Post found that 81% supported vaccination requirements in public schools. Ninety percent of parents supported measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines, while a much smaller majority, 56 percent, supported vaccinating children against the flu. Only 43% of parents in this study said it was important for their children to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
In November, the Pew Research Center released a study finding that 71% of American parents had at least some confidence in vaccine safety testing and 68% had at least some confidence in the timing of childhood vaccinations.
Caplan found, as did the Pew study, that beliefs about vaccine safety vary along political and class lines, with Republicans and respondents who received less traditional education having less confidence in vaccines. Even so, a poll of parents in deep-red Georgia conducted in late October and early November by Emory University found that 88% of parents in the state believe vaccines are safe.
The Emory study looked at parents’ understanding of vaccine coverage from insurers, and that’s where things got murky. Less than a third of Georgia parents knew that insurance companies generally follow ACIP recommendations when deciding which vaccines to cover.
For now, Schwartz said insurers are still required to cover vaccines because the federal government has left vaccination recommendations in a gray area that doesn’t categorically recommend vaccines, but also doesn’t recommend against them. The shared decision-making model continues to require insurers to cover vaccinations. Yet the Washington Post cited a 2016 study that found most pediatricians were unaware of it. Nearly 10 years later, uncertainty persists.
“I think there are still a lot of questions about what insurance companies will cover,” Weisz said.
