The Food and Drug Administration approved the next round of COVID-19 vaccines, but is restricting them to people at high risk for COVID complications.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the next round of COVID-19 vaccines Wednesday, but imposed new restrictions on who’s eligible to get receive them.
The agency is limiting the updated shots to people who are at risk for serious complications because they are 65 or older or have other health problems. Until now, COVID vaccines had been available to anyone 6 months and older regardless of their health.
The decision is expected to make it harder for many people, such as healthy children and healthy younger adults, to get a shot ahead of the expected winter COVID surge. That’s already generating confusion and apprehension that harkens back to the early days of the pandemic, when people often had to frantically search for a shot.
«I’m feeling a little déjà vu», says Clare Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers. «There’s a lot of anxiety about being able to get the vaccine.»
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to weigh in soon with influential recommendations on who should get inoculated. But the CDC has already dropped guidelines that call for all healthy children and healthy pregnant women to routinely get vaccinated – a decision many doctors and public health experts say is especially alarming.
Federal health officials say the changes are warranted because most people have so much immunity at this point. They also question the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness – doubts dismissed by most public health experts and contradicted by a large body of scientific evidence.A sweeping change to COVID vaccine regulation
«The American people demanded science, safety, and common sense. This framework delivers all three», Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a post about the regulatory actions on X.
Kennedy said the FDA has approved Moderna’s mRNA vaccine for those ages 6 months and older, the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine for those ages 5 and older, and the Novavax vaccine, which uses an older technology, for those ages 12 and older.
«These vaccines are available for all patients who choose them after consulting with their doctors», Kennedy wrote, adding that the emergency use authorizations for the vaccines that made them available quickly during pandemic had been revoked.
«It’s a welcome but overdue end to a policy», says David Gortler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. «But it is unclear as to why the EUA remained in place at all following full authorization by the FDA and the fact that the COVID emergency officially ended on May 11th 2023 — almost 30 months ago.»
Gortler adds, «Although the CDC very recently stopped publishing how many adults and children are still getting the COVID boosters in 2025, at last count it was around 23 million adults and 9.5 million kids, none of whom should be getting any mRNA covid injections.»Access to COVID vaccines could be difficult for many
While many people with concerns about the vaccines welcomed the new restrictions, the limitations could limit access and are being denounced by most public health authorities as unwarranted, unscientific and dangerous.
