States Need To Mimic Colorado Law Now That HHS Is A Dumpster Fire

Policy

from the no-confidence dept

At the beginning of this year, the Colorado state legislature introduced HB25-1097, a state law that updated the state’s disease control statutes. Eventually signed into law by the Governor in April, the bill does a whole bunch of things related to public health: repealed the state’s epidemic response committee, set a schedule for reviewing the state’s emergency plans every three years, and all sorts of things having to do with child immunization rules. Those include things like creating an official school record for immunization after doctor’s records of immunization are received, how camping organizations keep their own records for immunization for out of state campers, and so on. Mostly pretty yawn-inducing stuff.

But it also included this:

Direct the state board of health, in adopting rules establishing immunization requirements, to take into consideration, as appropriate and in addition to the recommendations of the advisory committee on immunization practices, the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American College of Physicians;

That reference to the advisory committee on immunization practices is more commonly known as the CDC’s ACIP. That would be the committee for which RFK Jr. fired all 17 members and replaced them with 8 new members, several of which are vaccine disinformation peddlers.

While this law and this provision of it largely flew under the radar, its purpose is now being shown and highlighted as a way to combat Kennedy and HHS’ nonsense. Other states need to pay attention here.

As the new Health and Human Services secretary makes unprecedented moves to undermine the current U.S. policy on vaccines, Colorado is leading the way in maintaining immunization recommendations, writing some protections into law. Colorado lawmakers saw this conflict coming and started preparing for the change, particularly to this critical national panel of doctors and vaccine experts, during this year’s legislative session.

So they passed a bill along party lines, later signed into law by the governor, which directs the state’s board of health to take into consideration recommendations from other high-profile doctors’ groups, not just the CDC panel.

“I think you could see the writing on the wall, that it was just becoming overly politicized rather than relying on actual science with this new HHS director,” said Sen. Kyle Mullica, a Thornton Democrat and an ER nurse. “We decided to protect Colorado,” said Mullica, who co-sponsored the legislation. He said Democratic lawmakers wanted to ensure “that in Colorado that we were able to rely on other science-based recommendations that potentially wouldn’t be as vulnerable to political upheaval that we’re seeing right now.”

This is a good start. Essentially, Colorado’s legislation presents something of a no-confidence vote in the CDC and HHS, choosing to open up guidance that had previously been limited to those agencies to incorporate NGOs that actually have public health and science in mind. Other states adopting similar laws would be useful both in maintaining good guidance on a state level and in highlighting yet again how much valid distrust of RFK Jr.’s leadership exists.

Ashish Jha, Biden’s COVID response coordinator and the dean of Brown University School of Public Health, highlights that this is about much more than keeping the public supplied with good scientific information. The game Kennedy is really playing isn’t one in which he makes vaccines entirely unauthorized or disappeared. Instead, he’ll just make them so expensive that few people can afford them.

ACIP’s recommendations serve as the backbone of vaccine access in the United States. When the panel endorses a vaccine, that guidance sets off a chain reaction: Insurers are required under the Affordable Care Act to cover it with no cost-sharing. Medicaid programs follow suit. Pediatricians and pharmacies stock vaccines knowing they’ll be reimbursed. And the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program, which provides free immunizations to nearly half of American children, uses ACIP recommendations to determine which vaccines are covered.

If Kennedy’s reconstituted ACIP rolls back key recommendations, as appears likely, the vaccines themselves won’t disappear — but access will erode. Insurers could stop covering them. Clinics might stop offering them. The VFC program could shrink. In effect, millions of children would lose protection against diseases such as measles, polio, meningitis and others we thought were behind us.

Kennedy might argue that he’s not taking anyone’s vaccines away, just giving people choices. But making vaccines costly and inaccessible produces the same result.

As Jha notes further in the post, laws like the Colorado law can only be step 1. Step 2 needs to be state-level regulation of insurance companies in order to ensure the Kennedy’s plan to price vaccines out of reach for most people isn’t successful.

Most important, states must ensure that recommended vaccines remain free and accessible. Legislatures and insurance regulators should require both private insurers and Medicaid programs to cover all vaccines endorsed by medical societies or state advisory boards — with no out-of-pocket costs.

This will help preserve access for millions, especially the most vulnerable.

This is by no means a perfect plan. States will vary in their coverage and their guidance. The residents in some states, particular their children, will live under worse conditions than others. Not all citizens will have the same healthcare available to them. In states where science is sneered at in the same manner as Kennedy’s HHS, some people, including children, will die.

But this is the reality in front of us. If no action is taken and this version of the CDC is allowed to convince the public that vaccines are the devil, or if vaccines are simply made too expensive to be widely adopted, the end result could be just what James Carville recently predicted.

“Bobby Kennedy is going to kill more people than any Cabinet secretary, maybe in history, with his idiotic vaccine policy,” Carville said Wednesday in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “The Will Cain Show.”

If a patchwork of state laws can stave off that nightmare from reality, so be it.

Filed Under: colorado, health and human services, public health, rfk jr., vaccines