Pediatricians and physicians have just received a major pay cut from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). According to a CMS memo directed to all 50 states on December 30, 2025, doctors will no longer receive a cash bonus for every vaccine they administer. Supporters of the policy say this will remove a perverse financial incentive for doctors that has contributed to America having some of the sickest children in the world.
Most parents don’t realize that this cash bounty exists for vaccines. Pediatricians get a bonus from the federal government and insurance companies for every shot they administer. However, they’re penalized and don’t get the lump-sum bonus unless they meet a quota for shots given each month or quarter.
This is why pediatricians become hostile to parents who ask for a religious exemption to vaccines. There are many reports of families being kicked out of pediatric clinics for legally opting out of vaccination. This bullying and manipulation leave them in a position where, in some states, parents cannot receive adequate medical care for their children.
The financial incentive for doctors to administer as many vaccines as possible has been truly generous. Starting in the 1990s, our chronic health problems as a nation started to skyrocket. Gen Xers born in the 1970s only received 3 childhood vaccines. By the late 1990s, kids were required to receive up to 86 shots, depending on the state they live in.
The correlation between the number of vaccines and chronic illness is obvious to everyone willing to pay attention.
During COVID-19, CMS under the Biden regime was paying doctors a $45 bounty for every mRNA shot they administered to patients. They received an additional $40 bounty if the shots were given during home visits. If a doctor vaccinated a family of four during a home visit, they received a $340 bonus from CMS, on top of the other fees they collected from insurance.
If a doctor had vaccinated 100 patients per week during COVID via home visits, which would be an easy task, they could have raked in $34,000 per month in bonus payments. And that’s just for the COVID shots.
For some other vaccines, doctors receive a bounty in the range of $17 per shot. At that rate, if a busy pediatric clinic gives 200 shots per week, it receives a monthly bounty of $13,600. Sums of cash in these amounts give doctors an incredible incentive to ignore parental concerns.
When it comes to certain individual vaccines, doctors receive a bounty of 25 cents on the dollar. For a single MMR shot, for example, it’s a bonus of $31 per shot.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden is a Stanford-trained physician. She was fired from her position at Houston Methodist Hospital in 2021 for prescribing ivermectin to a patient. She was also reprimanded by the Texas Medical Board for that single ivermectin prescription. Dr. Bowden notes that she lost over $1 million in bounty payments from CMS over her refusal to administer the dangerous and ineffective COVID-19 shots to her patients.
Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., calls the CMS decision to cease bounty payments for vaccines “the most consequential federal policy reversal on pediatric vaccine incentives” in years.
Lyons-Weiler co-authored a paper in 2021 that conducted a billing analysis of a large pediatric clinic in Oregon. This was a clinic that respected informed consent, which resulted in many parents declining the standard CDC childhood vaccine schedule. Parents would not allow their children to have as many vaccines if they were given informed consent on the risks the shots carry.
Lyons-Weiler’s analysis showed that this one clinic, which practiced informed consent, experienced over $1 million per year in projected losses from the CMS vaccine bounties.
The federal bounty that pediatricians are paid for hyper-vaccinating children is just one part of the equation. Some states—especially blue states—also pay a state-level cash bounty for shots. Those state bounties will still exist. However, taking away the federal incentive for vaccines will hopefully encourage more freedom-minded states to begin practicing true informed consent.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., praised the policy change at CMS: