Libby Richards, Purdue University On May 27, 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer include the COVID-19 vaccine on the list of immunizations it recommends for healthy children and pregnant women. The announcement, made in a video posted on the social platform X, comes on the heels of another announcement, made on May 20, in which the Food and Drug Administration revealed that it will approve new versions of the vaccine only for adults 65 years of age and older and for people with one or more risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes. The agency will require vaccine manufacturers to conduct clinical trials to demonstrate that the vaccine benefits low-risk groups. The Conversation U.S. asked Libby Richards, a nursing professor from Purdue University involved in public health promotion, to explain what these announcements mean for the general public.

Why are HHS and FDA diverging from past practice?

Currently, getting a yearly COVID-19 vaccine is recommended for everyone ages 6 months and older, regardless of their health risk. In the video announcing the plan to remove the vaccine from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule for healthy children and healthy pregnant women, Kennedy spoke alongside National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. The trio cited a lack of evidence to support vaccinating healthy children. They did not explain the reason for the change to the vaccine schedule for pregnant people, who have previously been considered at high-risk for severe COVID-19. Similarly, in the FDA announcement made a week prior, Makary and the agency’s head of vaccines, Vinay Prasad, said that public health trends now support limiting vaccines to people at high risk of serious illness instead of a universal COVID-19 vaccination strategy.

Was this a controversial decision or a clear consensus?

Many public health experts and professional health care associations have raised concerns about Kennedy’s latest announcement, saying it contradicts studies showing that COVID-19 vaccination benefits pregnant people and children. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, considered the premier professional organization for that medical specialty, reinforced the importance of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, especially to protect infants after birth. Likewise, the American Academy of Pediatrics pointed to the data on hospitalizations of children with COVID-19 during the 2024-to-2025 respiratory virus season as evidence for the importance of vaccination. Kennedy’s announcement on children and pregnant women comes roughly a month ahead of a planned meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel of vaccine experts that offers guidance to the CDC on vaccine policy. The meeting was set to review guidance for the 2025-to-2026 COVID-19 vaccines. It’s not typical for the CDC to alter its recommendations without input from the committee.

FDA officials Makary and Prasad also strayed from past established vaccine regulatory processes in announcing the FDA’s new stance on recommendations for healthy people under age 65. Usually, the FDA broadly approves a vaccine based on whether it is safe and effective, and decisions on who should be eligible to receive it are left to the CDC, which bases its decision on the advisory committee’s research-based guidance. The advisory committee was expected to recommend a risk-based approach for the COVID-19 vaccine, but it was also expected to recommend allowing low-risk people to get annual COVID-19 vaccines if they want to. The CDC’s and FDA’s new policies on the vaccine will likely make it difficult for healthy people to get the vaccine.

What conditions count as risk factors?

The CDC lists several medical conditions and other factors that increase peoples’ risk for severe COVID-19. These conditions include cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, chronic kidney disease and some lung conditions like COPD and asthma. Pregnancy is also on the list. The article authored by Makary and Prasad describing the FDA’s new stance on the vaccine also contain a lengthy list of risk factors and notes that about 100 million to 200 million people will fall into this category and will thus be eligible to get the vaccine. Pregnancy is included. Reversing the recommendation for vaccinating healthy pregnant women thus contradicts the new framework described by the FDA. Studies have documented that COVID-19 vaccines are safe during pregnancy and may reduce the risk of stillbirth. A study published in May 2025 using data from 26,783 pregnancies found a link between COVID-19 infection before and during pregnancy and an increased risk for spontaneous abortions. Importantly, a 2024 analysis of 120 studies including a total of 168,444 pregnant women with COVID-19 infections did not find enough evidence to suggest the infections are a direct cause of early pregnancy loss. Nonetheless, the authors did state that COVID-19 vaccination remains a crucial preventive measure for pregnant women to reduce the overall risk of serious complications in pregnancy due to infection. Immune changes during pregnancy increase the risk of severe illness from respiratory viruses. Vaccination during pregnancy also provides protection to the fetus that lasts into the first few months of life and is associated with a lower risk of COVID-19 related hospitalization among infants.

The changes to the CDC’s and the FDA’s plan for COVID-19 vaccines also leave out an important group – caregivers and household members of people at high risk of severe illness from infection. This omission leaves high-risk people more vulnerable to exposure to COVID-19 from healthy people they regularly interact with. Multiple countries with risk-based vaccination policies do include this group.

What about vaccines for children?

High-risk children age 6 months and older who have conditions that increase the risk of severe COVID-19 are still eligible for the vaccine. Existing vaccines already on the market will remain available, but it is unclear how long they will stay authorized and how the change in vaccine policy will affect childhood vaccination overall. To date, millions of children have safely received the COVID-19 vaccine. Data on whether children benefit from annual COVD-19 vaccines is less clear. Parents and clinicians make vaccination decisions by weighing potential risks with potential benefits.

Will low-risk people be able to get a COVID-19 shot?

Not automatically. Kennedy’s announcement does not broadly address healthy adults, but under the new FDA framework, healthy adults who wish to receive the fall COVID-19 vaccine will likely face obstacles. Health care providers can administer vaccines “off-label”, but insurance coverage is widely based on FDA recommendations. The new, narrower FDA approval will likely reduce both access to COVID-19 vaccines for the general public and insurance coverage for COVID-19 vaccines. Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance providers are required to fully cover the cost of any vaccine endorsed by the CDC. Kennedy’s announcement will likely limit insurance coverage for COVID-19 vaccination. Overall, the move to focus on individual risks and benefits may overlook broader public health benefits. Communities with higher vaccination rates have fewer opportunities to spread the virus. This is an updated version of an article originally published on May 22, 2025. Libby Richards, Professor of Nursing, Purdue University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nir Eisikovits, UMass Boston and Daniel J. Feldman, UMass Boston Christopher Pelkey was shot and killed in a road range incident in 2021. On May 8, 2025, at the sentencing hearing for his killer, an AI video reconstruction of Pelkey delivered a victim impact statement. The trial judge reported being deeply moved by this performance and issued the maximum sentence for manslaughter. As part of the ceremonies to mark Israel’s 77th year of independence on April 30, 2025, officials had planned to host a concert featuring four iconic Israeli singers. All four had died years earlier. The plan was to conjure them using AI-generated sound and video. The dead performers were supposed to sing alongside Yardena Arazi, a famous and still very much alive artist. In the end Arazi pulled out, citing the political atmosphere, and the event didn’t happen. In April, the BBC created a deep-fake version of the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie to teach a “maestro course on writing.” Fake Agatha would instruct aspiring murder mystery authors and “inspire” their “writing journey.” The use of artificial intelligence to “reanimate” the dead for a variety of purposes is quickly gaining traction. Over the past few years, we’ve been studying the moral implications of AI at the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and we find these AI reanimations to be morally problematic. Before we address the moral challenges the technology raises, it’s important to distinguish AI reanimations, or deepfakes, from so-called griefbots. Griefbots are chatbots trained on large swaths of data the dead leave behind – social media posts, texts, emails, videos. These chatbots mimic how the departed used to communicate and are meant to make life easier for surviving relations. The deepfakes we are discussing here have other aims; they are meant to promote legal, political and educational causes.

Moral quandaries

The first moral quandary the technology raises has to do with consent: Would the deceased have agreed to do what their likeness is doing? Would the dead Israeli singers have wanted to sing at an Independence ceremony organized by the nation’s current government? Would Pelkey, the road-rage victim, be comfortable with the script his family wrote for his avatar to recite? What would Christie think about her AI double teaching that class? The answers to these questions can only be deduced circumstantially – from examining the kinds of things the dead did and the views they expressed when alive. And one could ask if the answers even matter. If those in charge of the estates agree to the reanimations, isn’t the question settled? After all, such trustees are the legal representatives of the departed. But putting aside the question of consent, a more fundamental question remains. What do these reanimations do to the legacy and reputation of the dead? Doesn’t their reputation depend, to some extent, on the scarcity of appearance, on the fact that the dead can’t show up anymore? Dying can have a salutary effect on the reputation of prominent people; it was good for John F. Kennedy, and it was good for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The fifth-century B.C. Athenian leader Pericles understood this well. In his famous Funeral Oration, delivered at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, he asserts that a noble death can elevate one’s reputation and wash away their petty misdeeds. That is because the dead are beyond reach and their mystique grows postmortem. “Even extreme virtue will scarcely win you a reputation equal to” that of the dead, he insists. Do AI reanimations devalue the currency of the dead by forcing them to keep popping up? Do they cheapen and destabilize their reputation by having them comment on events that happened long after their demise? In addition, these AI representations can be a powerful tool to influence audiences for political or legal purposes. Bringing back a popular dead singer to legitimize a political event and reanimating a dead victim to offer testimony are acts intended to sway an audience’s judgment. It’s one thing to channel a Churchill or a Roosevelt during a political speech by quoting them or even trying to sound like them. It’s another thing to have “them” speak alongside you. The potential of harnessing nostalgia is supercharged by this technology. Imagine, for example, what the Soviets, who literally worshipped Lenin’s dead body, would have done with a deep fake of their old icon.

Good intentions

You could argue that because these reanimations are uniquely engaging, they can be used for virtuous purposes. Consider a reanimated Martin Luther King Jr., speaking to our currently polarized and divided nation, urging moderation and unity. Wouldn’t that be grand? Or what about a reanimated Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, speaking at the trial of a Holocaust denier like David Irving? But do we know what MLK would have thought about our current political divisions? Do we know what Anielewicz would have thought about restrictions on pernicious speech? Does bravely campaigning for civil rights mean we should call upon the digital ghost of King to comment on the impact of populism? Does fearlessly fighting the Nazis mean we should dredge up the AI shadow of an old hero to comment on free speech in the digital age?

Even if the political projects these AI avatars served were consistent with the deceased’s views, the problem of manipulation – of using the psychological power of deepfakes to appeal to emotions – remains. But what about enlisting AI Agatha Christie to teach a writing class? Deep fakes may indeed have salutary uses in educational settings. The likeness of Christie could make students more enthusiastic about writing. Fake Aristotle could improve the chances that students engage with his austere Nicomachean Ethics. AI Einstein could help those who want to study physics get their heads around general relativity. But producing these fakes comes with a great deal of responsibility. After all, given how engaging they can be, it’s possible that the interactions with these representations will be all that students pay attention to, rather than serving as a gateway to exploring the subject further.

Living on in the living

In a poem written in memory of W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden tells us that, after the poet’s death, Yeats “became his admirers.” His memory was now “scattered among a hundred cities,” and his work subject to endless interpretation: “the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.” The dead live on in the many ways we reinterpret their words and works. Auden did that to Yeats, and we’re doing it to Auden right here. That’s how people stay in touch with those who are gone. In the end, we believe that using technological prowess to concretely bring them back disrespects them and, perhaps more importantly, is an act of disrespect to ourselves – to our capacity to abstract, think and imagine. Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston and Daniel J. Feldman, Senior Research Fellow, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.