Editorial: Western states take only course on vaccine access

Published 1:30 am Saturday, September 13, 2025

By The Herald Editorial Board

Nature abhors a vacuum, as does the practice of sound science-based public health.

In the vacuum of doubt now surrounding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its guidance around access to vaccines for covid-19 and other infectious diseases under the leadership of an avowed vaccine critic, several states — namely Washington, Oregon, California and more recently Hawaii — have teamed to provide authorization on vaccines to assure their availability.

Last week, those states launched the West Coast Health Alliance, with the intent of providing evidence-based recommendations to the states’ residents regarding who should receive immunizations and credible information on vaccine safety and efficacy. Similarly, a coalition of eight states in the Northeast are also discussing a regional alliance on vaccine guidance.

The states’ governors, citing the dismissal of CDC doctors, scientists and advisers by the Trump administration, faulted “blatant politicization of the agency” for risking the health and safety of the American people.

“The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences,” the joint statement read.

The alliance is basing its guidance on long-trusted medical professionals and organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which objected earlier this year when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all 17 members of a panel of vaccine experts that had advised the CDC and ordered the agency to drop standing recommendations that healthy children and healthy pregnant women get the covid-19 vaccine and boosters.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved covid vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Noravax that are tailored to newer coronavirus variants, but that approval applies only to adults over 65 or those older than 6 months with an underlying condition that puts them at higher risk for complications from covid. The latest shots are not approved for healthy children and adults younger than 65.

Since this spring’s changes to guidance, even as Kennedy insisted to U.S. senators that anyone can get a coronavirus vaccine, some of those seeking the shots are being turned away by chain pharmacies, or are told they need to get a doctor’s prescription first or are informed that their Medicaid insurance will not cover the vaccine’s cost.

The four-state health alliance should ensure that won’t happen, if only for their residents.

The standing order, which essentially works like a doctor’s prescription issued by the state’s health officer, authorizes physicians, pharmacists, nurses and medical assistants to provide approved covid vaccines by request to those 6 months and older, including those who are pregnant, echoing the current recommendations from the AAP, ACOG and American Academy of Family Physicians.

Anyone requesting a covid vaccine who is rejected by a pharmacy can file a complaint with the state’s Pharmacy Quality Assurance Commission.

Similarly, health insurance coverage for those in Washington and the other states appears assured. State Office of the Insurance Commissioner Patty Kuderer recently wrote that private health insurance plans, which cover about 1 million people in Washington state, are required to cover the covid vaccine — considered a preventive service — regardless of actions at the federal level. Assurance for the coverage, however, is determined year by year. Benefits for plans filed this May will be in effect through 2026.

Several insurance companies with plans in Washington state, including Premera Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente and Regence BlueShield said they would continue coverage of the updated covid vaccines, regardless of federal guidance.

As well, coverage also is assured for enrollees in Apple Health (Medicaid) and the state’s Adult Vaccine and Childhood Vaccine Programs. Although supplies of vaccines for the two vaccine programs are not currently available and may not be in stock until later this month or in October, the state health department said.

Washington and other states are doing what they can, but the danger to public health remains.

The nation’s public health policy is now susceptible to the whims of a health secretary who is making wholesale changes to science-led determinations once made on the consideration and advice of respected experts and researchers.

Kennedy has gutted the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and stocked it with hand-picked skeptics, many who take pride in their advocacy against vaccines. That new committee is now expected to meet soon to revise or rescind recommendations for vaccines for Hepatitis B, RSV and covid. And those recommendations are key to determining access to vaccines and requirements for what health insurance plans, including Medicare and Medicaid, will cover.

Kennedy has canceled $500 million for research of mRNA vaccines, the groundbreaking technology that helped develop the covid vaccines in record time and could produce breakthroughs with vaccines for HIV, cancer and autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Kennedy, proving his reliance only on his own counsel, also sought and won the firing of the CDC’s director, Susan Monarez, only a month after the Senate had confirmed her, because she refused to fire agency experts and rubber-stamp directives she considered “reckless,” a move that prompted the resignation of top officials within the CDC.

That disrespect for science has begun to spread elsewhere, prompting Florida’s surgeon general and its governor to announce their intention to end mandatory childhood vaccines, a path that will drive down the community immunity that has kept a lid on diseases, including measles and polio.

While Washington and other states have successfully raised a shield that preserves access to vaccines and information for their residents and some protection for the nation’s public health, none of this is ideal; that shield is most effective when the policy is nationwide and provides vetted and shared guidance on vaccines, infectious diseases and broader health concerns that instill trust in the public health system.

That shield is now being shot through with holes large enough for the next pandemic to breeze through.