Children's Health Defense
Changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) updated 2025 immunization schedule for children, adults and pregnant women published last month consisted largely of timing revisions, newly approved brands of existing vaccines — including a new Hep B vaccine for pregnant women — or additional shots recommended for immunocompromised people.
The CDC didn’t add new types of vaccines to the schedule — last year the agency added COVID-19 vaccines and RSV shots for children, RSV for older adults and mpox for high-risk adults.
The CDC now recommends more than 200 shots over an individual’s lifetime. In 1983, the CDC recommended just 11 doses of seven vaccines for children. There were no vaccine recommendations for adults, including pregnant women, before 1986, when the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 granted vaccine manufacturers protection from liability for vaccine injuries.
CDC just published its 2025 vaccine schedules. We have now gone from 7 routine vaccine injections in 1986 to over 200 routine vaccine injections in 2025.
In 1986, before vaccine makers had broad immunity to liability for injuries, CDC's schedule had 7 routine childhood… pic.twitter.com/naAGCGZdeW
— Aaron Siri (@AaronSiriSG) November 29, 2024
Pregnant women until 2012 were advised against getting most vaccines based on concerns the vaccines could harm the fetus.
Now the CDC recommends five or more routine shots (seven or more vaccines) during pregnancy, including flu, COVID-19, Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis), RSV or respiratory syncytial virus, Hepatitis B or Hep B, Hep A (if at risk for infection) and possibly a flu booster.
The CDC says getting vaccinated while pregnant is essential because it helps mothers avoid disease and also creates antibodies that will protect their babies during the first few months of life before they can be vaccinated themselves.
However, experts who spoke with The Defender said the rising number of recommended shots for pregnant women is concerning, particularly because of the lack of randomized controlled trials large enough to identify safety issues and because long-term safety data are lacking.
“Vaccine safety data are scarce,” said Children’s Health Defense Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski. “In pregnancy, it’s even more scarce. And it’s almost non-existent in situations where multiple vaccines are administered during pregnancy — which is the clinical reality.”
Where data do exist, the sample sizes are often so small the study is practically unusable, Jablonowski said.
CDC adds new Hep B brand despite lack of safety data in pregnant women
This year, the CDC added a new brand of Hepatitis B vaccine, Heplisav-B, to the list of vaccines that can be administered to pregnant women — after removing language that said Heplisav-B was not recommended in pregnancy “due to lack of safety data in pregnant persons.”
In the October meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC said its division of viral hepatitis was working to update the guidance for the use of the Hep B vaccine during pregnancy based on changes made to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) package insert, but the proposed deletion hadn’t been discussed with the working group…
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