Health insurers say they'll keep covering vaccines as a political fight widens

The country’s largest health insurance association said its members will continue to cover all vaccines currently recommended by the federal government, just ahead of an influential federal vaccine committee meeting today and tomorrow that may decide to change those recommendations.

AHIP (formerly America’s Health Insurance Plans) made the announcement ahead of the first meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with the 12 members appointed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, all of whom are vaccine skeptics. The committee is widely expected to consider dropping existing recommendations that all newborns receive the vaccine for hepatitis B, an often-deadly disease that has been almost eradicated in newborns since the shot was recommended 34 years ago.

The committee is also expected to vote on whether children under the age of four should receive the combined measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella vaccine (MMRV) or separate vaccines for each disease. The combined vaccine has been recommended by the CDC since 2005.

On Wednesday, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Susan Monarez, who Kennedy recently fired, testified before a Senate committee that Kennedy has said he will change the current childhood immunization schedule this month — and that he presented her with little to no scientific evidence backing up any changes. Kennedy has long criticized the number and safety of the vaccines that children now receive.

Health insurers are required to make vaccines free if they are recommended by ACIP and subsequently adopted by the CDC, so any changes by the committee to vaccine policy could have a significant impact on the affordability and accessibility of vaccines.

AHIP said in a statement, “Health plan coverage decisions for immunizations are grounded in each plan’s ongoing, rigorous review of scientific and clinical evidence, and continual evaluation of multiple sources of data.”

Consequently, AHIP continued, “health plans will continue to cover all ACIP-recommended immunizations that were recommended as of September 1, 2025, including updated formulations of the COVID-19 and influenza vaccines, with no cost-sharing for patients through the end of 2026.”

AHIP’s members provide coverage to more than 200 million Americans. They include most Blue plans, Centene, Aetna, Elevance, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, Molina, and Cigna. 

At the start of ACIP’s meeting on Thursday, newly named committee chair Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish statistician who opposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates, lambasted former CDC directors and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), all of whom have publicly criticized Kennedy and ACIP’s approach to vaccine policy.

 “We are currently experiencing heated controversies about vaccines, and a key question is: Who can you trust?” Kulldorff said. He complained about AAP’s decision to no longer participate in the committee’s meetings and refusal to engage in public debate, saying, “Here is my advice: When there are different scientific views, only trust scientists who are willing to engage with and publicly debate the scientists with other views.” He added, “With such debates, you can weigh and determine the scientific reasoning by each side, but without it, you cannot properly judge their arguments.”

Kulldorff also announced that the ACIP panel has convened working groups to reexamine vaccines given during pregnancy and to reexamine the childhood vaccines schedule.

Dr. Jason Goldman, the president of the American College of Physicians, told the committee that he has been concerned about the MMRV discussion since a recent change in procedures that removed top medical organizations from the committee's working groups. 

“You do not have those subject matter experts with the real-world experience to understand the implementation of these vaccines and the concerns of the patients,” Goldman said. “You don’t have the voice of the patients we take care of. You’re not looking at all of the aspects of how we evaluate vaccine implementation. You’re looking at very small data points and misrepresenting how it works in the real world and how we take care of our patients.”