Thirteen medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the AAFP, are backing the OB GYN society's parallel guidance for pregnant patients.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has published the first standalone maternal immunization schedule in its history, and it directly contradicts the current federal recommendation by telling pregnant patients to get COVID-19 and seasonal flu shots the CDC has stopped endorsing.
The new 2026 Maternal Immunization Schedule sits at the center of an unusual coordinated response from 13 medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women's Health, and the American College of Nurse-Midwives. Together, they are offering clinicians a parallel reference at a moment when the CDC schedule under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. no longer aligns with the specialty's reading of the evidence on pregnancy vaccination.
"This is the first time ACOG has issued a standalone maternal immunization schedule," said ACOG President Camille Clare, according to Ars Technica. She framed the new document as a way to give patients and clinicians "reliable, evidence-based information on maternal immunizations from a trusted source," and attributed the current confusion to "changing national recommendations coupled with rampant vaccine misinformation."
The divergence is concrete. ACOG continues to recommend the COVID-19 vaccine and the seasonal influenza vaccine for pregnant people. The CDC, after a policy shift engineered by Kennedy, has dropped both. The federal schedule still recommends two vaccines during pregnancy: Tdap, to protect newborns from pertussis, and RSV, to shield infants from respiratory syncytial virus in their first season. The split is narrower than a blanket rejection of the federal schedule, but on the two vaccines Kennedy has most publicly targeted, the OB-GYN society and the federal government now point in opposite directions.
That gap matters in the exam room. Insurance coverage, hospital policy, pharmacy stocking, and electronic health record prompts all tend to track the CDC schedule. When a specialty society publishes its own, it is partly filling the operational void those systems leave behind, and partly signaling to clinicians that they can keep recommending vaccines the federal government has walked back.
The coalition ACOG has assembled is the second signal worth watching. The American Academy of Pediatrics, representing the pediatricians who will see these babies in their first months, is publicly backing a maternal schedule, a notable move given the AAP's separate, ongoing friction with Kennedy over childhood immunization. The American Academy of Family Physicians extends the recommendation into the primary care clinics where many pregnant patients first hear about vaccines. Nurse practitioners and midwives widen the reach into community-based practices that obstetricians do not always cover.
ACOG is not claiming authority over federal policy, and the new schedule does not replace the CDC's. It is a parallel document, designed to be the reference a clinician reaches for when the federal one no longer reflects the specialty's evidence reading. That distinction is what the coalition is built to defend: not a refusal to engage with the CDC, but a refusal to let the CDC's current pregnancy guidance stand as the only evidence-based option on the shelf.
The schedule lands in a policy environment that is still moving. Kennedy's reshaping of the CDC's immunization committees and recommendations has been contested in court and in public hearings, and the precise status of vaccines during pregnancy has shifted more than once in the past year. Pregnant patients asking their OB-GYN, midwife, or family doctor about flu and COVID-19 shots are now likely to hear one answer from the specialty societies and a different one from federal materials. The ACOG schedule is meant to make the specialty answer easy to find.