‘Government bureaucracies should never coerce doctors or families into accepting vaccines,’ the health secretary said.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stopped mandating health care providers report the immunization status of patients.
Kennedy decided to stop requiring doctors to list vaccinations children have received, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said in a Dec. 30, 2025, letter to state health officials.
Doctors participating in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program were previously required to report how many children received specific vaccines by their second birthday, and other shots by the time they turn 14 years old.
Kennedy also eliminated a requirement that doctors report the immunization status of pregnant women, according to the notice.
“Government bureaucracies should never coerce doctors or families into accepting vaccines or penalize physicians for respecting patient choice. That practice ends now,” Kennedy, head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), of which CMS is a part, said in a post on X. “Under the Trump administration, HHS will protect informed consent, respect religious liberty, and uphold medical freedom.”
Federal law requires that doctors report certain measures while caring for the approximately 78 million people on Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and that states convey that data to CMS. The reporting was voluntary when first implemented. It began being mandated in fiscal year 2024.
CMS did not respond to a request for comment. In the letter, the agency noted that Kennedy has authority under the law to make changes to the required measures “to improve and strengthen” the reporting requirements, and that pursuant to that authority, CMS was removing the immunization reporting requirements.
The agency said that providers can choose to voluntarily provide the information moving forward “to allow CMS to maintain a longitudinal dataset while exploring alternative immunization measures.”
It also said that starting in 2026, officials would be exploring the development of new measures that would “capture information about whether parents and families were informed about vaccine choices, vaccine safety and side effects, and alternative vaccine schedules.”
Officials plan to talk with states, providers, and other stakeholders about those measures.
