Snubbing RFK Jr., States Announce Plans to Coordinate on Vaccines

U.S.|Snubbing Kennedy, States Say They Will Offer Their Own Vaccine Guidance

Three Democratic-controlled West Coast states announced plans on 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 C.D.C.’s vaccine decisions. Other states, including several in the Northeast, 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’s governor, 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 C.D.C. Now that all 17 experts on the agency’s advisory panel have been dismissed by Mr. Kennedy — several of them replaced by vaccine skeptics — the opaque federal landscape has led to a hodgepodge of state moves.

Dr. Paul Offit, the 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 like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 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 H.H.S., you can’t trust the C.D.C. — as we always have up to this point — what do you do?” he asked.