False claim that CDC would require covid vaccines for kids goes viral

On Tuesday morning, a Fox News contributor claimed on Twitter that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was set to mandate that schoolchildren get coronavirus vaccines. By Tuesday evening, the claim was being repeated by the nation’s most popular cable news show, and had been amplified to millions more on social media.

“The CDC is about to add the Covid vaccine to the childhood immunization schedule, which would make the vax mandatory for kids to attend school,” host Tucker Carlson tweeted, sharing a segment from his show that has been viewed more than 1.5 million times online.

But the claim was wrong: The CDC cannot mandate that schoolchildren receive vaccines, a decision left up to states and jurisdictions, the agency and multiple public health officials said. The initial tweet by Nicole Saphier, a radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, also misconstrued a planned meeting of CDC advisers, who voted Wednesday to add coronavirus vaccines to the federal Vaccines for Children (VFC), a safety-net program that offers the shots at no cost. A separate meeting set for Thursday would address the agency’s immunization schedule for children.