Mass. could break with feds over vaccinations. Here’s how and why it matters
Massachusetts could go its own way on vaccination guidelines as U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes changes to federal policy that have raised eyebrows among public health experts.
Gov. Maura Healey tucked the language into a $2.45 billion spending bill that she sent to state lawmakers on Thursday.
Specifically, the Democratic governor has proposed allowing the state Department of Public Health to "decouple immunization recommendations and requirements in Massachusetts from federal standards if necessary to preserve public health."
Assuming the majority-Democrat state Legislature goes along with it, the language, if approved, would let the state "set independent standards for Massachusetts" if the federal government "fails to maintain a robust schedule of vaccine recommendations, DPH can set independent standards for Massachusetts."
That's a big deal because insurance companies provide coverage for vaccines recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In June, Kennedy, a well-known vaccine skeptic, fired all 17 members of the CDC advisory panel that makes those recommendations, replacing them with fellow vaccine skeptics .
Kennedy justified the move by arguing that it would restore public trust in vaccines.
One of the members of that panel came from Massachusetts : Lin Chen, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Travel Medicine Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.
Chen was appointed to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices last summer by the Biden administration.
Last month, a constellation of public health organizations filed a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn Kennedy's decision to rescind public health recommendations about coronavirus vaccines.
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston charges that Kennedy violated the law and imperiled public health with a May decision to end the government's long-standing blanket recommendation that children and pregnant women should receive the shots, The Washington Post reported.
Meanwhile, local health providers have held off on ordering vaccines, fearing that they won't be reimbursed for them, according to The Boston Globe .
Officials in Massachusetts also have been conferring with colleagues in neighboring states about coordinating their own vaccine guidelines, the newspaper reported.
"At this moment we can't always look to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] for the guidance we received previously," Dr. Robbie Goldstein, the state's commissioner of the Department of Public Health, said earlier this week, according to The Globe. "This is a little bit of building the plane while we fly it."
The entire debate comes as public trust in vaccines, which were battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, continues to be shaky.
Most adult respondents to a KFF tracking poll in May said they were at least "somewhat confident" in the safety of many routine vaccines.
That includes those for measles (83%), the flu (74%), and — among adults ages 50 and older for whom these vaccines are recommended — pneumonia (82%) and shingles (79%), according to the poll.
The public, however, remains less confident in the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine amid continued partisan disagreement. A little more than half (56%) of adults said they are at least "somewhat confident" that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe, including nearly 9 in 10 Democrats (87%), about half of independents (55%), but just 3 in 10 Republicans, according to the KFF poll.
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