COVID-19 vaccination substantially lowered risks for children last season, CDC report says

COVID-19 vaccines were universally recommended for all children ages 6 months and older last season. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Children who were vaccinated against COVID-19 last season had a “substantially lower risk” of emergency department and urgent care visits related to the virus, according to a report published Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The vaccines were about 76 per cent effective in preventing these outcomes among healthy children ages 9 months to 4 years and about 56 per cent effective among children ages 5 to 17 compared with those who did not receive an updated vaccine for the 2024-25 respiratory virus season, the report said.

The federal analysis was based on data from about 98,000 children who tested positive for COVID when they visited an emergency department or urgent care between late Aug. 2024 and early Sept. 2025. Visits were captured from 250 emergency departments and urgent cares across nine states that participate in a research collaboration that the CDC is involved in.

Outcomes for children who received the updated vaccine for the 2024-25 respiratory virus season were compared with those who had not received the latest shot but may have had earlier series.

“In a population with some persons having preexisting levels of protection from previous vaccination, previous infection, or both, 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccination provided children with additional protection against COVID-19–associated (emergency department and urgent care) encounters compared with no 2024–2025 vaccination,” the researchers wrote.

During the 2024-25 respiratory virus season, COVID-19 vaccination was recommended for all people 6 months and older. Those recommendations were adopted by the CDC after votes from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, the agency’s panel of independent vaccine advisers.

But ACIP was overhauled this year, with all previous members removed and replaced by people handpicked by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Now, CDC recommendations say COVID-19 vaccination for children ages 6 months to 17 years should be “based on shared clinical decision-making” between families and health care providers.

In a break with the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to explicitly recommend COVID-19 shots for young children.

“The impact that shifting from universal to shared clinical decision-making (otherwise known as individual-based decision-making) will have on COVID-19 vaccination coverage or effectiveness in children is unclear, underscoring the importance of continued monitoring of COVID-19 (vaccine effectiveness,” the CDC researchers wrote in the new report.

Former public health officials are sounding alarms about significant changes being made to the country’s vaccine policy under the Trump administration.

Kennedy said he personally directed the CDC to update its website to contradict its longtime guidance that vaccines don’t cause autism, a link that an group of experts from the World Health Organization once again debunked in an analysis published Thursday. President Trump has also directed Kennedy and the CDC to re-evaluate the U.S. vaccine schedule after ACIP recommended significant changes to how hepatitis B vaccines are handled.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is also looking into whether deaths “across multiple age groups” have been related to COVID-19 vaccines, weeks after a senior agency official claimed — without offering evidence – that COVID-19 vaccinations resulted in the deaths of 10 children.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s chief medical and scientific officer, claimed in a memo late last month that COVID-19 “was never highly lethal for children” and that the effects of it “are comparable” to respiratory viruses for which there aren’t annual vaccines.

There was not sufficient data to assess how well COVID-19 vaccines protected children against hospitalization in the new CDC report; only about 13 per cent of children – about one in eight – got the updated shot for the 2024-25 season, CDC data shows.

But children are vulnerable to severe outcomes from COVID-19.

COVID-19 hospitalization rates have decreased over time, but about 38,000 children were hospitalized with COVID-19 during the 2023-24 season, according to the CDC report – more than 1 hospitalization for every 1,900 kids. And infants had a higher hospitalization rate than all other age groups aside from seniors.

“There’s no evidence that the vaccine is more dangerous to to a child than the than the virus is,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security focused on emerging infectious disease and pandemic preparedness.

And, he says, the new report reinforces what has been known: that there’s value in vaccinating children against COVID-19.

“This type of data illustrates that the vaccine has value to the individual getting vaccinated, that it’s not just being done for no benefit or to check a box, that the vaccine is a piece of technology that makes it easier to live your life in a world in which COVID is present,” he said

“If you can prevent that disruption from having to go to the emergency department to get a child checked out, why wouldn’t you do it?”

CNN’s Brenda Goodman contributed to this report.

By Deidre McPhillips, CNN