- West Coast states formed an alliance on vaccine guidelines, promising clear scientific data on safety and efficacy, while Florida is cancelling vaccine mandates.
- Past and current CDC employees are calling for HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s resignation or firing.
- President Trump continues to support Kennedy, who says he can fix the "broken" CDC.
West Coast states have teamed up to craft vaccine guidance and avoid confusion created by new federal policy and turmoil at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Florida has countered, announcing it will end all vaccine mandates, including in schools.
Meanwhile, more than a thousand past and present CDC employees have signed a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Congress calling for his resignation or firing.
And Kennedy himself has fired another well-known expert from the vaccine advisory panel.
One could be forgiven for having trouble keeping up with the claims and counter-claims in HHS and particularly the CDC at the moment.
California, Oregon and Washington announced Wednesday that they’re forming a “health alliance” to coordinate vaccine recommendations. The New York Times reported that “the alliance is intended to provide residents with scientific data about vaccine safety and efficacy, and to issue guidance on vaccines for respiratory illnesses like Covid and the flu, as well as an array of childhood immunizations.”
The states’ governors — Oregon’s Tina Kotek, Washington’s Bob Ferguson and California’s Gavin Newsom — said the public health agency is now “a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences.”
The New York Times separately reported that “hours after the Western states’ announcement, Florida announced it was going in a starkly different direction. The surgeon general said the state would end all vaccine mandates, including for children to attend schools, claiming in a news conference that each mandate “drips with disdain and slavery.” Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, endorsed the plan, though it was not immediately clear whether it would require legislative input."
Given federal restrictions placed on who can and cannot get the COVID-19 vaccine — or should or should not, amid questions about whether the guidance will morph into actual rules — it’s not clear whether the West Coast Health Alliance will be able to make a difference in its states. And there are questions, including whether cost of vaccines will be covered by insurance if the federal government doesn’t recommend them, whether pharmacies and doctors will make them available to those not on the government’s target list of people who are 65 and older or who have specific chronic conditions and even whether states can require vaccines the CDC does not recommend, among others highlighted by the Times.
States set their own school immunization rules, generally basing them on federal recommendations. So what will happen in any given state is not clear.
Pharmacies are trying to navigate different rules about who can give vaccines that vary state to state. For instance, CVS announced it will not provide COVID-19 vaccines without prescriptions in 16 states and that it may not provide them at all in several. As prime season to get a COVID-19 vaccine or booster approaches, there’s a lot of confusion.
The letter to RFK Jr. and Congress
The letter came just days after nine former CDC directors wrote a guest essay questioning Kennedy’s leadership of the agency, as Deseret News earlier reported.
The letter from a group calling itself Save HHS, signed by more than 1,000 CDC employees or past employees, called for Kennedy’s resignation and added that should he refuse, he ought to be fired. Some of them didn’t sign their actual names, citing fear of retaliation, according to The Hill.
Among complaints, the group decried Kennedy’s decision to fire the members of the vaccine advisory panel that makes recommendations on guidelines, replacing them with “political ideologues who pose as scientific experts and manipulate data to fit predetermined conclusions.”
They also cited the fact that the CDC’s director, Susan Monarez, was fired last week after she refused to fire several long-term experts in the organization and she disagreed with Kennedy on vaccine recommendations. Several key employees then resigned.
Per the letter, “We believe health policy should be based in strong, evidence-based principles rather than partisan politics. But under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS policies are placing the health of all Americans at risk, regardless of their politics.”
Vaccine expert fired
Dr. Paul Offit, an expert on infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology and virology with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has been critical of Kennedy’s stance on vaccines. He was just notified that he’d been fired from the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biologics Products Advisory Committee, where he’d served two terms starting in 2017. He told The Guardian he was offered a third term, set to expire in 2027, by FDA officials and that he was given no reason for his dismissal.
The Guardian article noted that Offit is apparently the only one who’s been dismissed.
The panel is not the same one from which all members were fired in June. Kennedy replaced the members of that panel, CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, with new members, including a number known to share his skepticism regarding vaccines. Critics have claimed some of them have no vaccine expertise.
Health and Human Services responds
President Donald Trump has given no indication that Kennedy’s role as Secretary of Health and Human Services is in jeopardy. Shortly after he nominated Kennedy for the job, Trump said he’d given Kennedy the OK to “go wild” on health issues.
The Hill separately reported that Trump’s alliance with Kennedy has placed him in a bit of a quandary. “In doing so, Trump has made it more difficult to embrace what he has called arguably his greatest accomplishment: the rapid development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19. And it could pose a threat to his political fortunes if Kennedy presses ahead with drastic changes to vaccine policy.”
HHS is firm in its stance that Kennedy is not attacking the CDC, but is, rather, fixing an organization he described as “broken.”
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon provided The Hill with a statement that read, in part, “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform and more personnel changes. From his first day in office, he pledged to check his assumptions at the door — and he asked every HHS colleague to do the same.”
The statement continued, “That commitment to evidence-based science is why, in just seven months, he and the HHS team have accomplished more than any health secretary in history in the fight to end the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”