The Covid Vaccine-Pregnancy Flip Flop
RFK Jr. just made it difficult for pregnant women to protect themselves against Covid. Why?
To understand why pregnant women are no longer recommended to receive a Covid vaccine, we need to go back to the beginning. In December 2020, Pfizer and Moderna reported the results of their phase 3 studies of mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 virus. Pfizer’s trial included 40,000 people: Moderna’s 30,000. Neither trial included pregnant women. Typically, when pregnant women aren’t studied in a vaccine trial, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will not recommend the vaccine. But Covid was different.
By late 2020, it was clear that Covid increased the risk of preeclampsia, preterm births, and other complications of pregnancy. Pregnant women with Covid were also more likely to be hospitalized, more likely to be ventilated in an intensive care unit, and more likely to die than women of the same age with Covid who weren’t pregnant. This wasn’t surprising. Because of their relatively immune suppressed state, pregnant women are susceptible to a variety of other severe respiratory diseases, like influenza. For these reasons, even though the Covid vaccines hadn’t been studied in pregnancy, the CDC stated that pregnant women “could reasonably choose” to get the vaccine. If they made that choice, they were urged to enter the V-Safe surveillance system, which monitored the pregnancy through birth by weekly updates on iPhones. By April 2021, about 4,000 women had been vaccinated without negative outcomes for either the mother or infant. The CDC then stated that Covid vaccines were “urgently recommended” for pregnant women.
Fast forward five years. On May 20, 2025, Martin Makary, commissioner of the FDA, and Vinay Prasad, head of the Centers for Biological Evaluation and Research (CBER), published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine stating that Covid vaccines would be available for people less than 65 years of age who were on a list of high-risk groups. Pregnancy was included on that list.
Seven days later, on May 27, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, made an announcement in a video posted on X that Covid vaccines were no longer recommended for healthy pregnant women. “I couldn’t be more pleased,” enthused Kennedy. “We’re now one step closer to realizing President Trump’s promise to Make America Healthy Again.” Ironically, Martin Makary, who had just published an article claiming pregnancy was a risk factor for severe Covid, was by his side. Two days later, on May 29, 2025, the adult immunization schedule eliminated the recommendation for pregnant women to receive a Covid vaccine. The United States is now the only country in the world that doesn’t consider pregnancy to be a risk for severe Covid infection.
Normally, a change of this magnitude would be vetted through the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), professional groups like the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) among others, and public comment. Not this time. In fact, the CDC was completely blindsided by RFK Jr.’s announcement.
The decision to put pregnant women at unnecessary risk is the result of one man’s zealotry. In the years ahead, RFK Jr. will likely do everything he can to make vaccines less available, less affordable, and more feared. To believe otherwise, is to ignore everything he has said and done for the past 20 years.
Thank you, Dr. Offit, for your clarity, courage, and long-standing dedication to science and public health. While others stay silent or, worse, enable dangerous policy shifts, you have spoken out forcefully against the reckless removal of COVID vaccine recommendations for pregnant women.
The most striking detail? Dr. Marty Makary, who just published a paper affirming pregnancy as a high-risk condition for severe COVID, stood smiling beside RFK Jr. as he announced this rollback. Days later, the official recommendation was erased. Makary’s weak attempt to justify this contradiction is not just unconvincing. It is intellectual surrender.
This decision was not science. It was politics dressed up in a lab coat. It puts pregnant women and their babies at risk. We need more physicians like Dr. Offit, who are grounded in evidence and unafraid to speak hard truths.
As a labor and delivery nurse I can say anecdotally that yes pregnancy should be considered a risk factor. I’ve never seen so many pregnant women be intubated in my 18 years, maybe 2 total before 2020, since then, 3 per year? And respiratory disease related death! Shame on RFK. His dad is probably rolling in his grave and I hope
He reads this.