The US dramatically altered its recommendations for a series of vaccines, which drive billion-dollar earnings for giants like Merck and Pfizer.
The U.S. federal government has ended its recommendations that all children receive vaccines against the flu and five other diseases, reducing the routine schedule from 17 diseases to 11 in a unilateral move made Monday at the behest of President Donald Trump.
For vaccine manufacturers, the change is “all in not great, but this can be managed,” BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan David Seigerman told BioSpace in an email. “Investors have been more cautious on the upside from vaccines given the current administration and recent ACIP meetings,” he added, noting the reformulated CDC vaccine advisory committee’s frequent anti-vaccine activity.
Previously, the CDC recommended at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, two rotavirus vaccine doses and one influenza vaccine dose. All of those vaccines are now left to “individual choice.”
The changes will hit Merck, among other companies, which manufactures the rotovirus vaccine RotaTeq, and reduce the recommended number of doses of the company’s Gardasil HPV vaccine from two shots to one.
Merck has already seen declining revenue from Gardasil, driven by lowered demand in other countries, particularly China. But, excluding China, sales of Gardasil declined 2-3% in the third quarter of 2025, according to the company’s earnings report, where it highlighted dropping demand in Japan. At the same time, sales of the vaccine have recently been rising in the U.S., “due to higher net pricing and favorable public-sector purchasing patterns.”
RotaTeq netted Merck $711 million worldwide in 2024, while Gardasil took in about $2.2 billion, according to the company’s year-end earnings report.
The recommendation for children to receive a pneumococcal vaccine was left in place, and that’s “a good thing for the pneumococcal disease landscape,” Salim Syed, the managing director of equity research at Mizuho, told BioSpace in an email. That industry captures “a large market ($8Bn+), and where children represent about 2/3 of revenue,” Syed added.
“Investors have been quite bearish for some time now that this administration would treat all vaccines equally (vs Covid-19 vaccines), but this is clearly not the case, so should help sentiment for stocks in this vaccine sleeve,” Syed said. This includes major manufacturers like Pfizer and Merck, as well as smaller up-and-comers like Vaxcyte.
Vaxcyte, which does not have any approved vaccines, is prepping a 31-valent shot to go up against Pfizer’s Prevnar, which accounted for $1.6 billion in sales in 2024. Another rival is Merck’s Capvaxive, which took in $244 million in sales in the third quarter of 2025, according to Merck’s third earnings report.
Public health groups universally decried the changes to the vaccine schedule. “Making these changes amid ongoing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases shows a disregard for the real confusion families already face,” Ronald Nahass, the president of the Infectious Disease Society of America, wrote in a statement after the news broke.
“As we are already seeing signs of a severe respiratory season, this is not the right time to make changes that are not supported by clear evidence,” Robert Hopkins, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Disease, said in a statement to BioSpace.
On the industry side of the vaccine space, investors are likely to keep their heads down and hunt for other opportunities in biopharma while current anti-vaccine headwinds are blowing, Seigerman said.
“Vaccines are not going to be the driver of an investment in Merck—at least under the current admin,” he concluded. “Too much uncertainty and policy headwinds for folks to get excited.”
