SACRAMENTO, California — With Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature on a new law Wednesday California broke from the federal government over vaccines, becoming the latest and largest state to assert its own authority over immunizations in the face of upheaval under President Donald Trump and his Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Newsom and governors from three other Democratic-controlled Western states also on Wednesday released a schedule of seasonal vaccines the states recommend for residents – a job long filled by federal health officials.
Taken together, the moves marked a dramatic power shift on a critical public health issue as California and the other states rewrote a decades-old framework for determining which vaccines are available to the public and covered by insurance.
“Our states are united in putting science, safety, and transparency first — and in protecting families with clear, credible vaccine guidance,” the governors of California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii said in a joint statement Wednesday. “The West Coast Health Alliance stands united in protecting public health and always putting safety before politics.”
With the vaccine schedule and the new powers for state officials in California's law, Newsom and the other governors took steps to counter what many political leaders and scientific authorities have said is a perilous crackdown by Kennedy on vaccines that undermines trust in science-based medicine and could increase Americans’ exposure to disease.
Under Kennedy, the Food and Drug Administration restricted eligibility for Covid-19 vaccines this year to people over 65 and those with health problems, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer recommends it for healthy children and pregnant women. In June, Kennedy also cut loose the 17-members of a committee that makes vaccine recommendations to the CDC and replaced them with his own appointees. The recently fired CDC Director Susan Monarez testified before a U.S. Senate panel Wednesday that Kennedy pushed her out after she refused his demand that she rubber stamp the decisions of the newly-formed committee, saying she lost her job for “holding the line on scientific integrity.”
California’s new law, AB 144, hurriedly written and passed in the final days of the state’s Legislative session last week, formally divorces the state’s vaccine laws from the authority wielded by Washington. Under the law, the state’s recommended list of which vaccines should be administered and when is pegged to the recommendations the federal government put out at the beginning of the year before Kennedy began implementing changes.
Because so much of state policy on vaccines traditionally has been based on federal recommendations, the new law also exorcises most references to most federal bodies, replacing them with state agencies . Insurance coverage and prescribing authority for vaccines, for example, will no longer be based on recommendations of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, but those of the state’s Department of Public Health.
Such recommendations carry significant weight. States often base their school vaccine programs, insurance coverage, nursing home mandates and other decisions around vaccines on the guidance ACIP gives to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other states around the U.S. have taken similar steps, although most have relied on executive orders by governors and California is the first to set its new rules in law.
Governors in New York, Illinois and Arizona issued executive orders to allow pharmacists to write prescriptions for Covid-19 vaccines now that federal action has made them harder to get. State public health departments or pharmacy boards in New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia and Nevada have also issued standing orders to make it easier for pharmacists to administer Covid-19 vaccines regardless of federal action.
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