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Heidi Overton, President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Food and Drug Administration played a larger role in driving the process to reduce the number of vaccines the government recommends to children than emerged during her Senate confirmation last month, when Republican senators asked her whether she’d stand up to anti-vaccine voices in the administration.
An aide on the president’s Domestic Policy Council, Overton helped edit and craft a scientific justification that was used to underpin cutting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations from 17 to 11 vaccines in January, according to a senior administration official and three people familiar with the process.
“It was Heidi driving this whole thing,” said a former senior administration official, noting that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supported the policy push.
The Senate health committee did not vote on whether to advance Overton to the Senate floor before departing earlier this month, leaving the decision for the lame duck session. If Republicans ultimately support her, Overton will lead the agency responsible for vaccine policy after making a bigger contribution to the Trump administration’s effort to reverse decades of American policy on childhood vaccines than was widely understood.
“Every vaccine on the U.S. market right now are safe and effective according to the FDA,” Overton told Senate Health Committee Chair Bill Cassidy, R-La, during the hearing.
But throughout the fall of 2025, Overton built consensus across health agencies around narrowing the list of recommended universal childhood vaccines, meeting with Trump administration officials including Kennedy; then-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary; Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicare and Medicaid; Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and Stefanie Spear, a senior HHS official and close confidant to Kennedy.
Others in the administration say that Overton’s work is a reflection of the nature of a White House policy job, not her own priorities.
“I think there is a misperception that because Heidi is the point of contact for the White House on a lot of issues, that she personally is doing something because of her personal views or or motivations,” a separate administration official said, noting the White House is “top-down.”
The Atlantic reported in July that Overton had been part of a team that created an initial draft of childhood vaccine recommendations.
Kennedy was prepared to endorse Denmark’s vaccine schedule, which recommends vaccinations against 10 diseases for all children, as an option for American parents based on the memo. But Kennedy’s December press conference was canceled at the last minute, according to three people familiar with the discussions.
Before the scheduled event, HHS lawyers raised concerns to senior health officials that it lacked evidence and would be susceptible to legal challenges, two of the people said.
On Jan. 5, former Health Deputy Secretary and then-acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill signed a decision memo that adopted a revised childhood immunization schedule based on the assessment conducted by Høeg, the acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the time, and Martin Kulldorff, an HHS aide.
The American Academy of Pediatrics challenged the revised schedule in court, and a federal judge put it on hold in March.
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When Trump nominated Overton in August to lead the FDA, prominent Make America Healthy Again activists objected, saying she would be too friendly toward drugmakers if confirmed.
“This narrative took hold that Heidi was not aligned with Kennedy on this, was more aligned with pharma [on] vaccine stuff, and was in favor of a more maximal vaccine schedule,” the former senior administration official said. “And that’s just not the case, not what happened.”
An HHS official said Overton was tasked with putting Trump’s policy priority into a document that was “suitable for distribution throughout the White House.”
“Someone needed to sort of pull the different strands together and make sure they came together into a quilt that was at least representative of what the different folks were trying to do,” the HHS official said. “The president had already expressed, and has continued to express a very strong desire to revisit vaccines, in part because he’s concerned about complications. This is not something that she would have personally desired. I am quite confident.”
At her Senate confirmation hearing in September, Cassidy pressed Overton on her commitment to defending the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and asked whether she’d stand up to Trump under pressure.
“If he asks you to do something which goes against the guarantee you’ve made to the American people through us, what will you do?” Cassidy asked.
“I would give him my best advice,” Overton replied.
Cassidy is a trained gastroenterologist and liver specialist who is leaving office this year after losing a primary election where Trump endorsed his challenger and has said Kennedy’s vaccine approach broke commitments made during his own confirmation process. His office declined to comment when asked about Overton’s involvement in drafting the scientific justification document.
When Trump nominated Overton, Cassidy posted that her involvement in Trump’s “nonsensical vaccine executive order” in August, which aimed to break up the established measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into multiple doses, was “almost disqualifying.”
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., pressed Overton at the confirmation hearing about whether she thought splitting the MMR vaccine into multiple shots or reducing the number of childhood vaccines were “good options.”
“My job in my current role is to take the president’s directive, provide options to him for him to make the decision,” Overton responded.