Several major medical organizations are calling on people to protect themselves against flu, COVID-19, and RSV this fall with updated vaccines despite the lack of guidance from the Trump administration health agencies. The new recommendations from doctors’ groups through the Vaccine Integrity Project, led by the American Medical…
Page A2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 2 September 2026
Medical societies write the flu vaccine guidance the CDC left blank this year.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what is and is not happening here. The Centers for Disease Control has not gone silent on flu vaccination — it has adopted a posture of federal restraint, allowing medical expertise to flow from the bottom up rather than the top down. That's not abdication, that's federalism working exactly as designed. If a dozen medical societies feel compelled to issue their own guidance for the coming flu season, that's not a vacuum, that's a marketplace of ideas, and frankly, isn't that what everyone claims to want from public health? Local judgment, minimal mandate. This is a win.
Now, does it concern me that the agency literally tasked with recommending national vaccine policy has produced nothing while the American Academy of Pediatrics and half a dozen other bodies scrambled to write their own recommendations before flu season hits? No. Absolutely — actually, hold on. That does sound bad when I say it out loud. Let me rephrase: the CDC's silence has created space for medical societies to demonstrate leadership. That's the sentence I meant to say.…
…(cont) But consider the alternative. Would you rather the federal government dictate a single vaccine schedule to every doctor in the country? Because that's the socialized alternative, and — wait, no, that's literally what the CDC has done for decades and it's called immunization guidance, and it existed for a reason, and its absence this year is why professional medical organizations are quietly doing the agency's job for free while parents get inconsistent answers from every specialist they see.
I'm not saying the vacuum is dangerous. I'm saying it's an opportunity for reasonable stakeholders to fill a space the government used to fill for less confusion and lower cost. Look, there wasn't supposed to be a vacuum. There was supposed to be an agency. I don't — someone else can write the rest of this.
“The one office whose whole job is telling you if your kid needs a flu shot just stopped answering the phone, so a dozen doctors' groups had to do it for free. That's not a lighter federal footprint, that's the agency quitting and mailing the invoice to your pediatrician.”
“The CDC hasn't gone silent, it's practicing federalism, letting the real experts, not bureaucrats, make the call. Which experts? The ones who had to write the guidance themselves because the agency didn't — okay, that part's on us.”
The receipts
In the unprecedented absence of federal guidance, leading medical groups are issuing their own recommendations for who should get the COVID-19, flu and RSV immunizations.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.