Moves by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. to reshape the nation’s vaccine policies are leading Maine and other Democratic-led Northeast states to discuss creating their own regional vaccine advisory group.
Specifics are light in the early stages of the talks, but they hint at a complicated effort to potentially make competing recommendations after Kennedy in June replaced all members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with advisers who have criticized and spread misinformation about vaccines.
That panel heard Thursday from an anti-vaccine activist and then voted to no longer recommend seasonal flu vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal despite a lack of evidence it causes harm. Medical groups warned that may affect vaccine availability globally, and Kennedy’s panel will also review childhood vaccines that have been approved for decades.
Officials in Maine, which has a universal childhood vaccination program, are talking with counterparts in the other Democratic-led states of Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island about a possible vaccine advisory group. The Washington Post first reported that June 24.
It’s an example of how medical groups, vaccine manufacturers and states are considering how to work around the decisions from Kennedy and the CDC advisory panel, whose recommendations heavily influence state policies. It is also an example of how blue states are banding together from policy arenas to the courts to resist Trump administration policies.
Maine Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Lindsay Hammes said Wednesday the state’s CDC officials participate in regional collaboration talks but said she did not immediately have more details on conversations surrounding a potential group. A New York State Department of Health spokesperson alluded to ongoing talks by saying it regularly holds “informal conversations to share information and best practices on public health preparedness.”
Although the creation of parallel vaccine recommendation and distribution systems would face challenges, the conversations involving state officials and medical associations are welcomed amid “families scrambling to find trustworthy information right now,” Caitlin Gilmet, director of the pro-vaccine advocacy group Maine Families for Vaccines, said.
“But we shouldn’t have to be in this position,” Gilmet said Friday. “We had a system for this, and it worked.”
Kennedy, whom U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, voted to confirm as President Donald Trump’s health secretary while U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, opposed his nomination, also announced in May the CDC would no longer recommend COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women or healthy children, though the CDC contradicted him on the child front.
Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said his agency and the CDC are committed to ensuring vaccine guidelines are “rigorous, independent and truly in service to the health of the American people — not corporate interests.”
In Maine, two Cumberland County parents who have not vaccinated their young son for religious reasons sued the state in 2022 over a law that took effect a year prior ending religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccine requirements for public and private school students.
Rep. Gary Drinkwater, R-Milford, said he thinks a regional vaccine advisory group should wait to move forward until that pending federal lawsuit is settled. Drinkwater, who has unsuccessfully tried to pass a bill restoring the religious exemption, also said he assumed a regional vaccine advisory group would discuss “restricting religious freedom.”
As Maine and other states mull next steps, Kennedy made more headlines Wednesday by saying the U.S. will stop funding an international vaccine agency, Gavi, while claiming it “ignores the science” on vaccine safety. The secretary posted a video to X describing “a time of popular revolt against established institutions that have lost the public trust, and that includes medicine.”
“President Trump and I are committed to winning it back,” Kennedy said.
