RFK Jr. Misleads About Safety of COVID-19 Vaccine in Children – FactCheck.org

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In recent interviews, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has minimized the risk COVID-19 poses to kids and exaggerated the risk of the vaccine, incorrectly claiming that the shot poses a “profound risk” to children. While serious side effects can occur, they are rare, and have not been shown to outweigh the benefits of the vaccine in protecting against COVID-19.

Kennedy’s remarks come as he is reportedly considering removing the COVID-19 vaccine from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s childhood immunization schedule, a move that could reduce accessibility to the vaccine.

On April 22, when Fox News’ Jesse Watters asked about taking the COVID-19 vaccine off the schedule, Kennedy, who has long spread misinformation about vaccines, said the recommendation for children “was always dubious” because “kids had almost no risk for COVID-19.” (Both Watters and Kennedy misleadingly suggested the vaccine was mandatory for children, but as we’ve explained, being on the CDC schedule doesn’t make a vaccine mandatory.)

“Certain kids that had very profound morbidities may have a slight risk, but most kids don’t,” he continued. “So why are we giving this to — to tens of millions of kids when the vaccine itself does have profound risk? We’ve seen huge associations with myocarditis and pericarditis, with strokes, with other injuries, with neurological injuries.”

Kennedy made similar claims during an interview on “Dr. Phil Primetime” that aired on April 29. Replying to a question about the vaccine schedule by a member of the audience, Kennedy said the justification for giving COVID-19 vaccines to kids “is very, very weak” and that kids are “at almost a zero risk” from the disease. “We’re seeing a lot of adverse events from the vaccine, particularly in children — myocarditis, pericarditis, even strokes,” he added.

Dr. Sean O’Leary, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases, told us Kennedy’s claims are “inaccurate.” 

“The vaccines are very safe in kids,” he told us in a phone interview, referring to the COVID-19 shots. 

Myocarditis and pericarditis, the inflammation of the heart muscle and the outer lining of the heart, were identified early-on as rare side effects of some COVID-19 vaccines. The risk of these side effects is highest for adolescent and young adult males after a second dose, but is still very low. For younger children, the risk is so low it is sometimes not detectable in vaccine safety surveillance systems. According to CDC data, no increased risk has been observed for any age group since the 2022-2023 season. There’s also no evidence of an increased risk of strokes or neurological problems following vaccination in children.

It’s true that kids are typically at much lower risk of getting severely ill from COVID-19 than adults, and some physicians do not think it’s necessary for healthy children to receive annual updated doses. But the risk of COVID-19 to children is “not no risk,” O’Leary said. “Through much of the pandemic, COVID was in the top 10 causes of death among children, and it was not just children with severe comorbidities. There were, unfortunately, lots of pediatric deaths, many of them in healthy children — and certainly, you know, thousands of hospitalizations as well.”

The CDC currently recommends that everyone 6 months of age get vaccinated against COVID-19, including a dose of the most recent formulation of the shot. In April, however, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices discussed shifting from a universal recommendation to a risk-based recommendation for certain populations. Although there is no consensus among ACIP members yet, O’Leary, who is an AAP liaison to ACIP, said removing the universal recommendation for kids under 2, where they’re seeing the highest rates of hospitalizations among children, is not on the table.  

“We are not discussing removing that recommendation for the younger kids,” he said. “And whether that cut-off is 2 or 4 or 5 — right now, the discussion has basically been for kids under 5 to continue with the universal recommendation.” 

We reached out to HHS asking for support for Kennedy’s claims, but we didn’t get an answer. 

COVID-19 is Riskier Than Vaccine

Three years of vaccine safety monitoring data shows that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe in children. As the CDC explains, children may experience some mild and temporary side effects, as is expected after any vaccination. But “adverse reactions are rare” and “the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known risks of COVID-19 and possible severe complications.”

Myocarditis and pericarditis were identified as rare serious side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, as we’ve reported. But over time, that risk has appeared to decline.

“No increased risk was observed in VSD and VAERS during the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 seasons or the 2024-25 season to date,” a CDC slide from the ACIP meeting in April reads, referring to the Vaccine Safety Datalink and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

In addition, myocarditis following vaccination is “associated with less severe cardiovascular events” than myocarditis following a COVID-19 infection, the presentation notes.

“[M]yocarditis is more likely and more severe after infection compared with vaccination,” Charlotte Moser, co-director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center and a member of the ACIP, told us in an email. “In fact, no children have died from vaccine-related myocarditis, but some have died from infection-related myocarditis. So, opting out of vaccination because of concerns about myocarditis does not remove the risk.”

Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told us there are risks with the COVID-19 vaccines, but “the relevant comparison is the risk to children and teens of COVID-19 infections.” 

“I do not think it is accurate to say there is ‘almost no risk,’” as Kennedy claimed, Morris told us in an email, referring to the risk of COVID-19 infections to children. “A non-negligible proportion of children are hospitalized with COVID-19 or even end up in ICU, and a small but non-negligible proportion suffer inflammatory syndromes (MIS-C) after infection, or suffer from post-COVID-19 sequelae (PASC),” he said, referring to long COVID.

According to provisional CDC data presented in the last ACIP meeting, COVID-19 was an underlying cause of death for 152 children under 18 years of age between September 2023 and August 2024. “About 4 of every 10 children hospitalized with COVID-19 did not have any pre-existing conditions,” Moser told us. 

A study published in January in the Annals of Internal Medicine, based on more than 144,000 children and co-authored by Morris, suggests that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was effective in preventing moderate and severe illness and ICU admissions during the delta and omicron periods. A separate study co-authored by Morris, published in eClinicalMedical in January, showed that by preventing infections, the vaccine also protected children and adolescents from long COVID. 

“In terms of the ‘vaccine itself having profound risk,’ the risks of adverse events from vaccination for children are characterized in numerous studies, and has not been shown to be greater than the risk of COVID-19 infection in children,” he told us in an email. “For example, I have not seen anywhere that it has not been shown that risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 vaccine complications is higher than hospitalization from COVID-19 infection, which would be a relevant comparison.”

Morris told us he’s “not aware of any evidence” that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of stroke in children. He pointed to two studies, one looking at Vaccine Safety Datalink data from 245,000 children between 6 months and 5 years of age, published in Pediatrics in 2023, and another, published in JAMA Pediatrics the same year, which used data from three commercial claims databases to monitor vaccine safety in near-real time in more than 3 million children ages 5 to 17. Neither found an increased risk for stroke. 

“I have also not seen evidence for any neurological risks for children,” he added, noting that the two studies looked at Bell’s palsy and encephalitis or encephalomyelitis “and found no safety signal.”

During the Fox News interview, Kennedy went on to claim that the vaccine’s risk “was clear even in the clinical data that came out of Pfizer … there were about 25% more deaths in the vaccine group than the placebo group.”

Morris told us this “is not accurate.” The comparison of the number of deaths in the placebo versus vaccine groups is only statistically valid during the blinded period, he said, referring to when participants have not yet been told if they received the vaccine or a placebo. During that period, there were 15 deaths in the vaccine group and 14 in the placebo group. After that, placebo recipients were offered a vaccine and 90% of the group took one, Morris said. And as we’ve previously explained, no deaths “were considered related to vaccination” in the trial. 

“There is no statistical evidence that vaccinated had higher death rate than placebo in the Pfizer phase 3 trial at all,” Morris told us.

Removing COVID-19 Vaccine From Schedule

We asked the CDC how the COVID-19 vaccine might be removed from the immunization schedule and the implications of the change, but we didn’t get a response. According to a CDC website, the schedule is meant to “[g]uide health providers in determining recommended vaccines” for children and adolescents 18 years old and younger. ACIP reviews its recommendations every year and those recommendations result in the official schedule. 

Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at University of California Law San Francisco who specializes in vaccine law and policy, told us that “generally,” reversing a decision would need to follow the same process used to make the decision in the first place. 

“So you should go through ACIP for a revision to its recommendation, and then get approval of the CDC director or the Secretary,” she told us in an email. “But because ACIP is an advisory committee, the Secretary may be deemed to have the final authority to make the decision.”

Adding a vaccine to the schedule has other practical implications, as we have previously explained. One of them is a requirement of the Affordable Care Act that health insurance plans cover the vaccines listed in the schedule without charging a deductible or copay. If the ACIP changes its recommendations, “a change could mean no ACA coverage – insurance companies won’t have to cover them,” Reiss told us. 

“In terms of the standard of care, doctors can still recommend them, and that would be valid, especially if the recommendation is blatantly political, as here,” she said. To remove the COVID-19 vaccines from the Vaccines For Children program, which provides free vaccines to under-insured or uninsured kids, the secretary would have to overturn a separate recommendation, “and here, too, they would likely have to go through ACIP,” Reiss said. 

Although most of the ACIP work group supported changing the universal recommendation to a risk-based one for the next updated COVID-19 shot, during the committee’s last meeting some members raised concerns, including access to vaccination for children. A large majority of the work group thought that a risk-based recommendation should still allow any individuals wanting the protection of a COVID-19 vaccine to receive a shot.

Moser, from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center, supports a risk-based recommendation that considers age and health condition for those who are previously vaccinated and a universal recommendation for young children and others who have never been vaccinated.

“When COVID-19 first emerged, everyone was susceptible. At this point, six years later, we know that most people have some immunity to the virus that causes COVID-19,” she told us. “But, every year, between 3 and 4 million new susceptibles are born – our babies. Babies will gain immunity through vaccination or infection. Vaccination gives us control over when and how our babies gain that immunity. Infection leaves it to chance. Most babies will be fine after infection, but not all of them will.”

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