By Joseph Ax
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Seven northeastern U.S. states, including New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, have banded together to form a new public health coalition that will make its own vaccine recommendations in response to the Trump administration’s changes to federal vaccine policy.
The effort, called the Northeast Public Health Collaborative, resembles a similar collective of California and three other western states known as the West Coast Health Alliance, which issued its own vaccine recommendations on Wednesday that went further than the federal government’s latest guidelines.
The Northeast group includes Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island, as well as New York City, the largest U.S. city. Both groups are comprised solely of Democratic-led states.
In both cases, the coalitions reflect an attempt to overcome federal limits on vaccine accessibility, including for COVID-19, under the leadership of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic.
In June, Kennedy fired all members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s panel of vaccine experts, which votes on who should receive vaccines and on what schedule, and later replaced them with his own advisers, many of whom share his vaccine skepticism. Insurers typically use the panel’s recommendations to determine coverage for inoculations.
The panel was meeting on Thursday and Friday to consider whether to alter the nation’s childhood immunization schedule, which medical experts warn could lead to preventable deaths.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on Thursday that the Northeast coalition had agreed that updated COVID-19 vaccines should be given to children ages six months to 18 years, older children and adults with certain risk factors and adults older than 64. The group also said that all adults are recommended to be vaccinated.
The governor, along with those in several other states, had previously issued orders granting pharmacists the authority to give COVID-19 vaccines to anyone who wanted them, after the federal government authorized them only for older and at-risk Americans.
“As Washington continues to launch its misguided attacks on science, New York is making it clear that every resident will have access to the COVID vaccine, no exceptions,” Hochul said in a statement.
Several medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, are formulating their own vaccine recommendations for the fall respiratory illness season, including for the COVID-19 vaccine.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
