The Trump administration appears to be expanding RSV vaccinations to some adults starting at age 50, down from 60, following the advice of a recently fired panel of government vaccine advisers.
The decision appears on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage but as of Wednesday wasn’t on the agency’s official adult immunization schedule.
RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, typically is a coldlike nuisance, but it can be severe, even life-threatening, for infants and older adults. The CDC recommends vaccination for certain pregnant women and a onetime shot for everyone 75 or older. But people as young as 60 with health problems that increase their risk can also get it.
In April, the CDC’s influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended expanding RSV vaccination to high-risk adults as young as 50, too. But the CDC lacks a director to decide whether to adopt that recommendation and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t immediately act.
Last month, Kennedy fired all 17 members of that panel and handpicked seven replacements that include several vaccine skeptics.
The new panel alarmed doctors’ groups last week by ignoring settled science on a rarely used flu vaccine preservative and by announcing a probe of the children’s vaccine schedule. It didn’t revisit RSV vaccination for older adults.
Kennedy already had taken the unusual step of changing COVID-19 vaccine recommendations without consulting the committee.
On Wednesday, a page on CDC’s website said that on June 25, Kennedy had adopted the ousted panel’s recommendation to expand RSV vaccination to high-risk 50-somethings and it is “now an official recommendation of the CDC.”
That move was first reported by Endpoints News.