The CDC No Longer Recommends the COVID-19 Vaccine During Pregnancy and, Therefore, by Implication, During Infertility Treatments, and Breastfeeding – We Disagree!
So here we are: As the JAMA on July 11 in a News article by Rita Rubin, lead senior staff writer for Medical News at JAMA, put straight into the headline, The CDC No Longer Recommends COVID-19 Shots During Pregnancy – Now What?"
And here is our answer!
As the article noted, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, on May 27 announced in a 58-second-long video posted on X.com (formerly Twitter) that he had withdrawn the CDC's recommendation for vaccination of healthy children and pregnant women from the recommended immunization schedule of the CDC. She also noted that Kennedy in this short video was flanked by the heads of NIH and FDA, but by nobody from the CDC, the obviously responsible federal agency for vaccine recommendations. Interestingly, just days earlier, the head of the FDA and co-workers had included current and recent pregnancy as risk factors for Long COVID.
While we fully understand why healthy children don't need these vaccines—they only develop mild disease—we completely fail to understand the rationale for recommending against vaccinations before and during pregnancy.
That pregnancy, like the regular flu, represents a higher risk circumstance for more severe COVID, is indisputable and has been repeatedly reported in these pages as a strong reason for a vaccination recommendation for every woman planning on conceiving or already pregnant. Similarly, evidence for passive transfer of maternal immunity to offspring also supports prenatal and in-pregnancy vaccination against COVID. The Center for Human Reproduction (CHR), therefore, cannot agree with the policy change announced by Kennedy and maintains, as of this moment, its recommendation for preemptive maternal vaccination against COVID as well as the seasonal flu.
It will be interesting to see how insurance companies will react to this edict. It, of course, offers an almost ideal opportunity to refuse coverage for the vaccines. And, obviously, the government will no longer cover the expense. For further details, we refer to the JAMA article by Rubin (1).
It does not happen often that the CHR would agree with an Opinion article in JAMA—or for that matter any other medical journal—that contradicts government guidelines; but just as we have during the COVID pandemic disagreed with several government policies, so we find ourselves this time again in opposition. The reason is obvious: there is no place for ideology in medical decision-making. It always must be fact-based following best—at the time—available evidence. And until we see such evidence for the updated CDC position, we will continue to recommend to our patients vaccinations against COVID and the relevant flu strains if they are planning on pregnancy or already are pregnant.
This, of course, does not mean a vaccination mandate for COVID and/or influenza at the CHR. Very much to the contrary, it is a continuation of our aversion against mandates for patients. The CHR never mandates anything because nobody at the CHR feels qualified to tell other people how to live their lives. But patients will rarely find in the infertility field providers who are as well qualified as the CHR's physicians in making treatment recommendations.
Norbert Gleicher, MD
On behalf of the Center for Human Reproduction (CHR)
and The Reproductive Times
Reference
Rubin R. JAMA 2025; doi: 10.1001/jama.2025.11889. Online ahead of print.
THE EDITORIAL BOARD: Is medicine really once again promoting eugenics? The—at-times—absurdity of current medical publishing
In trying to bring to our readers relevant literature, we sometimes come across papers that hit us in the gut, and this can happen for various reasons. It is, of course, most enjoyable when the cause is a brilliant paper that offers a new idea or a new treatment. But there is, of course, also the other extreme, the paper that is really disgusting us because of how poorly designed it may have been, and/or for the stupidity of the message or interpretation of data. Recently, we also more often find ourselves disgusted by what peer review is at times allowing into print these days, sometimes in even quite good journals. It is one of these latter articles that spawned this editorial and involves a what we consider truly shameful article. Shameful for really too many different reasons, but not the least for taking a potentially important subject in one of our most important science journals and turning it into a political football.
Genevieve L. Wojcik, PhD, a statistical geneticist, genetic epidemiologist, and Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, apparently believes that medicine in the U.S. is once again promoting eugenics. Under the heading, "Eugenics is on the rise again: genetics must take a stand," she then summarized her Opinion article in Nature (of course not an unimportant platform for an opinion!) in one very telling sentence: "Scientists must push back against the threat of rising white nationalism and the dangerous and pseudoscientific ideas of eugenics” (1).
So, let's start the discussion of this article with some background information. First, of course, the definition of "eugenics" according to Merriam-Webster (2): “Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations' genetic composition." The definition by the National Human Genome Research Institute is significantly less polite and describes eugenics as an "immoral and pseudoscientific theory that claims it is possible to perfect people and groups through genetics and the scientific laws of inheritance." The institute further noted, "Eugenicists used an incorrect and prejudiced understanding of the work of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to support the idea of 'racial improvement’” (3).
And there is, of course, considerable history to advocating eugenics in medicine as well as in politics. In both of these areas, this history proved to be anything but positive. The person who, in 1883, coined the term "eugenics" was Francis Galton, not widely known—a cousin of Darwin.
In the U.S., eugenics, as Merriam-Webster also notes, has become virtually a dirty word closely identified with racism. Nobody exemplifies this more than Margaret Sanger, widely credited to be the founder of the country's birth control movement in the early 20th century, yet also increasingly accused of having been a racist, advocating for the extermination of African Americans and more specifically having founded Planned Parenthood with the intent to "help kill black babies before they came into the world” (4).
In Europe, eugenics was, of course, closely associated with Germany's efforts to create a "master race" and with the genocide of six million Jews and additional millions of Gypsies (Roma) as well as other minorities, Mengele's atrocities at Auschwitz, and the murder of mentally and otherwise impaired individuals.
Yet in medicine, starting in the early 20th century—on both sides of the Atlantic—Eugenics was anything but a dirty word! On October 7, (what a coincidence in the date to a recent October 7 event of extreme racism !!) of 1921, the report of the Eugenics Conference was, indeed, the lead article in Science (6). The box below contains the abstract of an unsigned 1938 Nature report (5), and the language is telling!
The Galton Lecture to the Eugenics Society, by Prof. John A. Ryle, on medicine and eugenics, is printed in the Eugenics Review, 30, No. 1. In a carefully considered address, it is pointed out that the eugenics movement needs the fuller support of the medical profession, and that this can only be given when medical men receive a fuller training in human genetics than is now the case. The family doctor is now rarely prepared, even if asked, to give advice connected with eugenic prognosis, although men and women are increasingly prepared to discuss such matters. Practicing physicians should be able to keep pedigree records of their patients who show mental and physical defects. Medical education should be altered so as to lay greater stress on animal and human genetics in place of some of the routine zoology and the more specialized biochemistry and biophysics. The constitutional variations which abound should be the subject of closer genetic study. Several chairs of human genetics should be instituted, and associated with them should be research centers concerned with morbid inheritance in man. Wider contacts of the Eugenics Society with medical societies throughout the country would be helpful. The foundation of a National Council is advocated, embodying an alliance between medicine, eugenics and sociology and having appropriate contacts with the Ministries of Health, Agriculture and Labour. The preservation of health as a primary function, with the treatment of disease as a secondary function, should become the new ideal.
Several very prominent physicians, intellectuals, and political leaders, including Alexander Graham Bell, Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes, Woodrow Wilson, and many others in that area, were, indeed, strong proponents of eugenics, and eugenics became in the 1920s a serious scientific movement on both sides of the Atlantic.
Wojcik, in her Nature article, noted that in 1924, the U.S. passed the so-called Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration with the intent to stem "a stream of alien blood with all of its inherited misconceptions." And in the immediately following sentence she apparently couldn't help herself any longer—and accusing President Trump of using "similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies," alleging persistent racist tropes, discussing "race as a social construct," and concluding that "geneticists and (other) scientists more broadly must consider the potential for their own work to be misappropriated."
But her political rage in one of the planet's leading science journals did not end with those almost clinically paranoid concerns. Of course, unreferenced, she made the totally bizarre claim that "in just the past three years, genetics has been used to justify the murder of Black and Hispanic people in the United States." And she accused, of course again unreferenced, "academic journals to persist in giving a platform to scientific racism, and the misappropriation of studies examining the geographical distribution of genetic variants to give white nationalism a veneer of academic respectability."
On which academic planet does this person live? And on which scientific and peer-reviewed planet do the editors of Nature exist these days?
But, if we are already talking about the resurrection of eugenics, let's have a quick look at who is really aggressively promoting the genetic "improvement" of the human species. Oh, what a surprise; it is the genetic testing community!
Here is only one piece of evidence that speaks for itself: Prenatal carrier screening started with less than a handful of tests of frequent recessive mutations in only specific populations, like sickle cell disease in individuals of mostly African descent and, for example, Tay-Sachs in Ashkenazi Jews, both populations with very high prevalence of these two respective conditions. Nobody then would, for example, have tested Ashkenazi Jews for sickle cell disease and African Americans for Tay Sachs.
As testing capabilities improved and costs declined, geneticists convinced medicine to expand testing to less frequent mutations and make it a test for everybody. In other words, it no longer mattered whether somebody belonged to a subpopulation at increased risk. The idea—heavily propagated by the genetics community—was to eliminate recessive diseases from the population in general, and that, of course, is nothing but a typical eugenic goal.
It first started with maybe up to 25 tests, then it went to around 100, while the likelihood of "catching" an affected couple for those diseases continued to decline (both partners must be carriers of a recessive mutation to create a 25% risk for the couple's offspring to express the disease. Then, renamed "expanded carrier testing," it went to ca. 300-350 recessive conditions, of course with ever declining risk because of declining prevalence in general populations, and—as of most recently—genetic testing companies are offering tests for over 500 diseases, most with risk levels similar low to chances of winning in the lottery.
If this is not eugenics, then what is? And if the conviction of helping improve mankind by preventing the birth of individuals with genetically inherited diseases with often infinitely small risk is not eugenics, what is it? The likely alternative motivation for all this testing is even more disgusting because it would mean that the genetic testing community really only pretends that its motives are to improve the genetic pool of mankind and, in reality, just wants to do more genetic testing.
And one cannot help but wonder, which of these two explanations is more despicable! There, indeed, is good reason to believe that it is the second explanation because commercial genetic testing is, of course, everywhere and, indeed, has even become a consumer product (see 23andMe).
In reproductive medicine, we have not far to look to find additional examples: How about preimplantation genetic testing of embryos for aneuploid (PGT-A)? Our readers will, of course, understand that we simply cannot restrain ourselves from bringing PGT-A into the discussion. Repeatedly noted in recent months in these pages, even ASRM/SART has now finally concluded that PGT-A is basically a worthless test that, in over 20 years of clinical utilization (in different formats and under different names) to date, has failed to show evidence of any clinical utility in general infertile populations (7). It, indeed, in certain subpopulations, actually reduces pregnancy and live birth chances in IVF.
And who has been imposing PGT-A upon the infertility field? Of course, the genetic testing community, or should we by now call it the genetic testing industry! And what have been the industry's principal arguments, all since proven to be incorrect? (i) That deselecting aneuploid embryos prior to embryo transfer would improve pregnancy and live birth rates; (ii) That the process would reduce miscarriages; (iii) That the process would reduce abnormal births; and (iv) That PGT-A would shorten the time to pregnancy with IVF; and that for all of these reasons PGT-A, therefore, would be cost-ineffective.
And then there is, of course, now also polygenic risk scoring of embryos, already freely offered by several genetics laboratories and IVF clinics—whether for polygenic diseases (diseases caused by multiple genes at once, like heart disease, cancer, hypertension), promised special future skills of offspring (we want a Michael Jordan!), or just eye color (we hear blue is the favorite color!). It doesn't matter that polygenic risk scoring, even in adults so far, has achieved only limited accuracy, and in human embryos, several professional societies (both in genetics and REI) have declared polygenic risk screening not only ineffective but unethical.
And the promotion by the genetic testing industry is once again pure eugenics, with the argument being to potential parents how can you not want to improve the life of your offspring by selecting the "best" embryo(s) with lowest disease risks, whether they run in the family or not, and either special physical characteristics and/or talents. And who cares that such polygenic risk scoring, even in adults, is still considered experimental and simply does not yet work with sufficient accuracy. But as PGT-A so well demonstrated over more than 20 years of clinical utilization, the reality of a true and validated purpose for the test was never a major concern of the genetic testing industry!
So, Dr. Wojcik and dear editors of Nature, please give us a break with your grandstanding about "what scientists can do" and should do in the current political climate. May we also suggest that you remain with your respective publications within the constraints of a framework of science and clinical practice, since nobody subscribes to your journals to learn about your increasingly often truly absurd political opinions, as discussed in the Nature paper.
Geneticists and other scientists and physicians must not, as you suggested, "stand against an (imaginary) global rise of a (non-existing) white nationalism which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals because this world exists only in Marxist imaginations and can be probably sourced to the extreme leftist dialectism of the Frankfurt school in the 1960s. Most of the world has, fortunately, passed on from this believe system because it, simply, makes no sense in a modern society that -more than ever before – is dependent on meritocracy to advance and prosper.
Younger generations and their academic teachers at many of our leading universities simply do not want to learn from history and continue to spew the kind of poisonous Marxist dialectics and theory that permeates Wojcik's commentary and has, whenever tried in history, been demonstrated to be destructive for society. How well did, for example, the "defund the police movement" do in recent years?
Nature and other overly politicized medical and basic science journals simply must stop writing about things they have absolutely no expertise in and concentrate on what their real purpose is: to communicate about and support progress in medicine and various other scientific fields. And, on a side note, we are also wondering what the administration of Johns Hopkins University is thinking about this article. Does even an obviously quite woke university like Johns Hopkins really like to be represented inNature magazine (or anywhere else) by a professor who—quite obviously—is more driven by political ideology than scientific clarity?
References
Wojcik GL. Nature 2025;641:37-38
Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics
National Human Genome Research Institute. Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883-Present). https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/timelines/eugenics
Latson J. Time. October 14, 2016. https://time.com/4081760/margaret-sanger-history-eugenics/
Anonymous. Medicine and Eugenics. Nature 1938;142:68. https://www.nature.com/articles/142068a0
Farber SA. Zebrafish 2008;5(4):243-245
Practice Committees of ASRM and SART. Fertil Steril 2024;122(3):421-434