March 11 (Reuters) – A key U.S. federal vaccine advisory panel has dropped a push against COVID mRNA vaccines, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the matter.
Some vaccine advisers under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr had been seeking to potentially stop recommending mRNA shots, but that plan is no longer moving forward, the report said.
A panel of vaccine advisers in September last year scrapped a broad recommendation for COVID shots and said that COVID-19 shots should be administered only through shared decision-making with a healthcare provider.
“The committee has not reconsidered its September 2025 decision to classify COVID vaccines under shared clinical decision-making on the CDC immunization schedules,” said HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon in response to the Washington Post report.
The advisers to the CDC are slated to meet next week and are expected to make recommendations on which vaccines Americans should receive and when.
Under the leadership of Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, the HHS decided in August last year to wind down mRNA vaccine development activities under its biomedical research unit.
He had said “the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu,” despite scientific evidence to the contrary.
These vaccines, produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, do not contain weakened or inactivated viruses, and instead give cells instructions to make a protein component of the virus, prompting the body to build immunity.
(Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Puyaan Singh; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Andrei Khalip)
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