vaccines newborns get :: Article CreatorCOVID Vaccine Changes Confuse And Upset Some Parents And Families
COVID vaccine access will be more limited for some groups, after federal health officials changed recommendations. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption
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Loryn Competti was watching the news with her husband at their home in Cincinnati when she heard about the new federal policy about who should get a COVID vaccine.
"I started crying," says Competti. "I was like, 'Am I really not going to be able to get this vaccine? Why? Why?' That's absolutely terrifying."
Competti, 30, is about five months pregnant, which means she's at high risk for serious complications from COVID. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has dropped its recommendation that healthy pregnant women routinely get vaccinated against the virus.
That means many insurance companies may not pay for the shots for them anymore.
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"I don't want to get COVID while I'm pregnant," Competti says. "I don't want it to hurt my child. I don't want to have a premature birth. I just know that there's complications that come along with it."
She also knows that the most certain way to protect her newborn son is by getting vaccinated herself so she can share her antibodies in her womb. Newborn babies are too young to get a shot themselves.
Loryn Competti, 30, and her husband Jack Mansfield, 30 pose for a photo in July of 2024. Loryn is about five months pregnant and wants to get vaccinated to protect herself and her newborn baby. Competti family hide caption
toggle caption Competti family
Competti is just one of many people worried about a flurry of changes implemented by the Trump administration in recent weeks affecting access to the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy pregnant women, kids with no other health problems, and adults under 65 with no risk factors.
The CDC has dropped its recommendation that healthy children routinely continue getting vaccinated and is now saying parents should talk to their children's doctors about getting the shots.
And, starting with new boosters coming this fall, the Food and Drug Administration will now only approve the shots for people who are at high risk for serious complications from COVID because they are age 65 or older or have risk factors for health problems that make them vulnerable. The FDA is demanding the vaccine companies conduct large, costly studies to prove the vaccines are still necessary and safe for everyone else.
Debates over existing recommendations
Administration officials argue the shots are no longer necessary for healthy pregnant women, kids and younger adults under 65 because so many people have so much immunity at this point.
Officials like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And FDA Commissioner Martin Makary also question the safety of the vaccines, even though billions of people have gotten the shot and there's widespread consensus among most public health and infectious disease experts that the shots are very safe and effective.
With most Americans declining to get COVID shots anyway, many people are indifferent to the changes. In social media responses received by NPR, some people said they were happy to see the changes, claiming the vaccines harmed them. And some outside observers agree with the changes.
"I think the pre-existing COVID recommendations, especially for anyone over 6 months of age, were pretty ridiculous and pretty extreme," says Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. "I think this aligns with what we do know about the current science about the vaccines and the current risks and rewards of vaccination."
The recommendation that parents of children may still get the shots after talking with their doctors could mean that insurers would still pay for the shots, but that's not guaranteed.
"Based on my collective observations of payer coverage of vaccines, the bottom line is to expect variability in coverage," says Richard Hughes, a health care policy lawyer who's following the issue.
Competti and others for whom the vaccines are no longer recommended or approved may still be able to access the vaccines because doctors could prescribe them "off-label," enabling people to pay for them themselves. But the shots can cost as much as about $200 each. Children getting their first vaccinations require two injections.
Competti knows she will probably still be able to get vaccinated by paying for a shot herself. But all the uncertainty and changing rules makes her anxious.
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"If we're losing access to COVID vaccines, I don't know if other things are going to get taken away," she says. "I'm scared."
Another concern is the moves may confuse many doctors, pharmacists and other health professionals, making some hesitant to offer the shots even if they could.
"These new HHS changes, in the absence of any justification, fuel myths and misconceptions about COVID vaccines," says Kelly Moore, president and CEO of Immunize.Org, an advocacy group.
"Conflicting recommendations, with professional medical societies on one side and HHS leadership on the other, will generate tremendous confusion among health care professionals and the public," Moore says. "People who are confused don't act. Their default is not to vaccinate."
Getting vaccinated to protect a family member
Healthy pregnant women aren't the only people who are worried about access to the shots.
Rachel Sampler Zelaya, 45, her husband, Jorge, 45, pose for a photo in Feb. 2025 with their children (from left) Clara, 11, Jorge 9, Lucia, 6. The Zelayas are from Cottage Grove, Minn. And want to continue to get vaccinated to protect their daughter, Lucia, who has asthma, but also to continue to protect themselves. Zelaya family hide caption
toggle caption Zelaya family
Ashley Hoskins, 45, and her husband, Bob, 50, who live in Nashville, Tenn., with their young daughter, also want to keep getting vaccinated. That's because Bob has to take powerful immune system suppressing drugs to prevent his body from rejecting his transplanted kidney.
"He's at a heightened risk to catch everything," Ashley Hoskins says. "So not only do we have to worry about whether or not he can receive vaccines. We have always had to be vaccinated as well to provide another wall of protection around him."
Bob Hoskins will still be able to get a shot. But now Ashley Hoskins and her daughter worry about whether they will too.
"Blanket decisions like this — it doesn't allow the families to think about their own private situation," Ashley Hoskins says. "How do we protect the people that we love? People are going to get hurt. So, yeah, it's frustrating. It's scary."
Rachel Sampler Zelaya, 42, of Cottage Grove, Minn., is concerned too.
Her 6-year-old daughter, Lucia, has asthma. So Zelaya wants to keep getting herself, her husband, Jorge, 45, and their two other healthy kids, Jorgito, 9, and Clara, 11, vaccinated to protect her too. But none of them would be automatically eligible except the youngest under the new policies.
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"I'm angry," Zelaya says. "It feels like I've had a choice taken away from me."
Some administration officials, however, question whether vaccinating one person protects those around them.
"To date there is no high-quality evidence that you getting a booster to visit your grandma protects your grandma beyond your grandma getting the booster herself," Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vaccines, said on a CDC video. "Does it lead to less transmission? Does it lead to fewer instances of severe disease? We are interested in evidence to inform this claim."
But other experts question that argument.
"Basically it seems common sense that vaccination, to the extent it reduces infection frequency or severity, could help protect others you may come in contact with," said Dr. Jesse Goodman, a former FDA vaccine official now at Georgetown University.
This would make sense, Goodman says, "given that the vaccinated may have less frequent infections in the three to six months after vaccination and given that some studies suggest there may be reduced shedding of virus."
For Hoskins, she's not just worried about protecting her daughter. She also wants to shield the whole family to protect everyone's health.
"It's not just a cold. It affects the vascular system, the neurological system, the immune system. And even mild cases have the potential to develop into long COVID," she says. "We vaccinate for far less. And this is definitely a disease to me that needs to be vaccinated for."
Suddenly having to worry about the vaccines again feels like a flashback to the early days of the pandemic, she says.
"It feels like we are going back in time again to where there's not a whole lot that I can do to protect my kids," she says.
Here's The Science Behind The COVID Vaccine In Pregnancy
You're pregnant, healthy and hearing mixed messages: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., removed the COVID vaccine from the list of vaccinations you should get.
"I couldn't be more pleased to announce that as of today the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule" Kennedy said on Tuesday.
But guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other researchers say being pregnant still puts you in a high-risk group that should receive boosters. The science is on the side of the shots.
COVID in pregnancy
Pregnant women who contracted COVID were more likely to become severely ill and to be hospitalized than women of the same age and demographics who weren't pregnant, especially early in the COVID pandemic.
An analysis of 435 studies from around the world in 2019-2020 found that pregnant and recently pregnant women who were infected with COVID were more likely to end up in intensive care units, be on invasive ventilation, and die than women who weren't pregnant but had a similar health profile. This was before vaccines were available.
Dr. Neil Silverman, a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology, directs the Infectious Diseases in Pregnancy Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He said he still sees more bad outcomes in pregnant patients who have COVID. The risk of severe COVID fluctuated as new variants arose and vaccinations became available, Silverman said, but the threat is still meaningful.
"No matter what the politics say, the science is the science, and we know that objectively, pregnant patients are at substantially increased risk of having complications," Silverman said.
A request for comment regarding the scientific literature that supports COVID vaccination for pregnant women sent to HHS's Public Affairs office elicited an unsigned email unrelated to the question. The office did not respond when asked for an on-the-record comment.
There's still a lot unknown about how COVID affects a pregnant person. The physiological relationship between COVID infections, mothers and fetuses at different stages of a pregnancy is complex, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.
The increased risk to pregnant patients comes in part because pregnancy changes the immune system, Rasmussen said.
"There is natural immune suppression so that the mother's body doesn't attack the developing fetus," Rasmussen said. "While the mother does still have a functioning immune system, it's not functioning at full capacity," she added.
Pregnant patients are more likely to get sick and have a harder time fighting off any infection as a consequence.
COVID can harm the placenta
In addition to changing how the immune system works, being pregnant also makes women five times more likely to have blood clots. That risk is increased if they contract COVID said Sallie Permar, Chair of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The virus that causes COVID can affect the vascular endothelium - specialized cells that line blood vessels and help with blood flow, Rasmussen said. In a healthy person, the endothelium helps prevent blood clots by producing chemicals that keep the vascular system running. In a person infected with COVID, the balance is thrown off and the production of those molecules is disrupted, which research shows can lead to blood clots or other blood disorders.
Permar said that those clots can be especially dangerous to both the pregnant women and baby. Inflammation and blood clots in the placenta could be connected to an increased risk of stillbirth especially from certain COVID variants, according to studies published in major medical journals as well as by the CDC.
When the placenta is inflamed, it's harder for blood carrying oxygen and nutrients to get to the baby, said Mary Prahl, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.
"If anything is interrupting those functions – inflammation or clotting or differences in how the blood is flowing – that's really going to affect how the placenta is working and being able to allow the fetus to grow and develop appropriately," she said.
It makes sense that we see the effects of COVID in the placenta, Silverman said. "The placenta is nothing more than a hyper-specialized collection of blood vessels, so it is like a magnetic target for the virus."
Blood vessels in the placenta are smaller, thinner and clot more easily than in the mother's circulatory system, he said.
Permar said more recent data suggests that pregnant women sick with COVID still have a higher risk of pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia, preterm birth, and miscarriage, even with existing immunity from previous infection or vaccination. Covid, she said, can still land women in the hospital with pregnancy complications.
Prahl said the connection between stillbirth and COVID may be changing given the immunity many people have developed from vaccination or prior infection. It's an area in which she'd like to see more research.
Vaccine safety and efficacy
There's already strong evidence that both mRNA-based and non-mRNA COVID vaccines are safe for pregnant women.
Prahl co-authored a small, early study that found no adverse outcomes and showed antibody protection persisted for both the mother and the baby after birth. "What we learned very quickly is that pregnant individuals want answers and many of them want to be involved in research," she said. Later studies, including one published in the journal Nature Medicine showing that getting a booster in pregnancy cut newborn hospitalizations in the first four months of life, backed up her team's early findings.
Prahl expects more evidence will be available soon to support the benefits of mothers receiving a COVID booster during pregnancy.
"I can say kind of behind the scenes, I'm seeing a lot of this preliminary data," she said.
She blames the delay in part on the Biden administration's scaling back of federal efforts to track COVID. "A lot of the surveillance of these data were pulled back," she said. The Trump administration is further cutting money used to track COVID.
But because the vaccine gives a pregnant woman's immune system a boost by increasing neutralizing antibodies, virologist Rasmussen is confident that getting one while pregnant makes it less likely a pregnant woman will end up in the hospital if she gets COVID.
"It will protect the pregnant person from more severe disease," she said.
Getting a COVID vaccine while pregnant also helps protect newborns after birth. Pregnant women who get vaccinated pass that protection to their infants.
According to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 90% of babies who had to be hospitalized with COVID-19 had mothers who didn't get the vaccine while they were pregnant. The study drew upon medical data in 12 states, collected between October 2022 and April 2024. Of the 1,470 infants sick enough to be hospitalized due to COVID, severe outcomes occurred "frequently" according to the report.
Excluding newborns hospitalized at birth, about 1 in 5 infants hospitalized with COVID required intensive care, and nearly one in 20 required a ventilator.
And babies too young to be vaccinated had the highest COVID hospitalization rate of any age group except people 75 and over.
The Trump administration's decision to remove the COVID vaccine from the list of shots it recommends for pregnant women means insurance companies may no longer cover it–so it may cost hundreds of dollars out of pocket.
"I don't want to be that doctor who just says, 'Well, it's really important. You have to vaccinate yourself and your kids no matter what, even if you have to pay for it out of pocket,' because everyone has their own priorities and budgetary concerns, especially in the current economic climate," Silverman said. "I can't tell a family that the vaccine is more important than feeding their kids."
But he and his colleagues will keep advising pregnant women to try to get the shots if they can.
"Newborns will be completely naïve to COVID exposure," he said. "Vaccinating pregnant women to protect their newborns is still a valid reason to continue this effort."
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Younger Infants Can Receive Measles Vaccines, Ponteix High Risk Area
Infants aged six months to 11 months can now get a dose of the measles vaccine.
Saskatchewan is making the vaccine available to younger children in areas with measles cases and a high chance of exposure.
That's for children who live in, are traveling to, or have contact with individuals in areas where there is a high risk of measles exposure.
"We're at a point now with the measles outbreak in Saskatchewan and the epidemic of measles across Canada that... Risk assessment is at the heart of these new recommendations around vaccine eligibility and expanding vaccine eligibility criteria that now includes infants who are aged 6 months to 11 months years or 11 months old," said SHA Senior Medical Health Officer Dr. Julie Kryzanowski. "Previously, we recommended that infants get immunized on time according to the routine vaccination schedule at 12 and 18 months."
She emphasized the vaccine isn't delayed to 12 months due to a health risk, but because it is more effective at that point in a child's development.
"The MMR vaccine works best when it's given after 12 months of age," Dr. Kryzanowski said. "At that age, those babies are able to produce a good immune response to the vaccine. Whereas less than 12 months of age, they may still have antibodies from their moms that blunt their response to the measles vaccine. When babies or children are immunized at an older age, they get better protection from that vaccine.
"We're currently in a measles outbreak, so we are looking at other strategies to control the outbreak and provide protection to population groups who are at higher risk. And we do know that babies can get seriously ill with measles."
If your child does get an early dose of vaccine, the SHA advises that they will still require the doses at 12 and 18 months to be considered fully vaccinated.
The government has listed Assiniboia, Ponteix, Kindersley, Canora, St. Walburg, and Wakaw as areas with a high risk of exposure.
A recent influx of measles cases in Saskatchewan started in southwest Saskatchewan and has spread across the province.
Measles is highly contagious and spreads easily to others through open air. Symptoms can include fever, cough, red eyes and a blotchy red rash. Severe complications of measles may include pneumonia, swelling of the brain and death.
Individuals with symptoms of measles should stay home and call HealthLine 811 for instructions. SHA is asking you do not seek treatment in person before calling ahead.
They're also emphasizing that the measles vaccine has been safely used for over 50 years and is free in Saskatchewan at public health offices.
You can get the latest measles information here: saskatchewan.Ca/measles.
Listen to full comments from Dr. Kryzanowski here:
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