CDC study says Covid shots continue to protect healthy kids from severe illness
A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Thursday finds that Covid vaccines continue to protect healthy children against serious illness — a conclusion that top federal health officials have questioned in recent months.
From late August 2024 to early September 2025, vaccines reduced the risk of Covid-related emergency room and urgent care visits by 76% among children aged 9 months to 4 years and by 56% among children aged 5 to 17 years, the study found.
The findings, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), are based on an analysis of approximately 98,000 emergency room and urgent care visits. Children included in the study had different levels of immunity from previous Covid vaccines and infections, so the study only looked at additional protection against the 2024-2025 Covid vaccines, the authors wrote.
The study appears to contradict Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s assertions. on vaccine effectiveness and address doubts raised by other federal health officials about whether children benefit from continuing to receive Covid vaccines.
This comes amid widespread concern among public health experts about the CDC’s loss of scientific credibility, as well as claims by former high-ranking staffers that the agency’s political leaders interfered with scientific research.
Dr. Debra Houry, who resigned as the CDC’s former chief medical officer in August, said the study’s release was reassuring.
“It’s good to see that data and science continue to come out of the MMWR. I hope this publication continues to be a voice for the agency’s scientists despite recent cuts to the CDC science office,” Houry said via text message.
The Office of Science produces the MMWR, the agency’s flagship scientific publication. Among other CDC departments, it was caught in a wave of mass layoffs during the government shutdown in October. The firings were later overturned and temporarily blocked by a federal judge. The CDC has seen three rounds of layoffs since President Donald Trump took office in January.
The agency’s COVID vaccine policy also changed under Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who oversees all federal health agencies, including the CDC.
Kennedy claimed at a Senate Finance Committee hearing in September that the vaccine industry could not produce a study showing that Covid shots were effective in healthy children. He added that “there is no clinical data” to support Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy people.
CDC research has consistently found that Covid vaccines and boosters protect against severe illness in adults and children.
Kennedy announced in May that the CDC would stop recommending Covid vaccines to healthy children and pregnant women, bypassing the usual regulatory process. Then, in September, a group of Kennedy-appointed vaccine advisers also voted not to universally recommend Covid shots, instead suggesting that people talk to their doctors about the benefits of getting vaccinated.
Two Food and Drug Administration officials, Commissioner Marty Makary and vaccine chief Vinay Prasad, said the benefits of Covid boosters were “uncertain” in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial published in May.
In a memo to agency staff last month, Prasad said Covid shots had killed at least 10 children and that “we do not have reliable data” on the benefits of vaccines in healthy children. Twelve former FDA commissioners denounced these claims, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine that “substantial evidence shows that vaccination can reduce the risk of serious illness and hospitalization in many children and adolescents.”
