States go their own (and contradictory) ways on vaccine policy
LOS ANGELES — Three Democratic-controlled West Coast states announced plans Wednesday to form a “health alliance” that would review scientific data and make vaccine recommendations for their residents, saying that the federal agency responsible for issuing such guidance for the country had become “a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science.”
The move, which comes at a time of unparalleled turmoil at the agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is an effort by California, Oregon and Washington to take scientific stewardship into their own hands after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, has taken control of the CDC’s vaccine decisions. Other states are considering joining in a similar effort.
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 Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, endorsed the plan, though it was not immediately clear whether it would require legislative input.
The differing state moves underscored the increasingly disjointed nature of vaccine policy across the country. States have always set their own vaccine policy and mandates for schoolchildren, but those rules were based upon national recommendations put forth by the CDC. Now that all 17 experts on the agency’s advisory panel have been dismissed by Kennedy — several of them replaced by vaccine skeptics — the opaque federal landscape has led to a hodgepodge of state moves.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was recently blocked from participating in a vaccine advisory committee for the Food and Drug Administration, said that unless all states aligned their guidelines with respected medical organizations, the cacophony of advice could ultimately obscure scientific truth.
“If you can’t trust the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, and with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of HHS, you can’t trust the CDC — as we always have up to this point — what do you do?” he asked.
“What happens if one state says one thing and another says something else? I just think it will only add to the confusion. Science is losing its place as a source of truth, and that is a dangerous time. We’re seeing the results of that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.