Mass. health commissioner says regional vaccine collaborative ‘actively communicating’ with NH

Massachusetts Health Commissioner Dr. Robert Goldstein said this week his team is “actively communicating” with New Hampshire’s public health agencies about a regional vaccine collaborative. (Photo courtesy of Executive Office of the Maryland Governor

New Hampshire is the only New England state not participating in a regional effort of Northeastern states to create vaccine guidance separate from the federal government. However, Massachusetts Health Commissioner Dr. Robert Goldstein said this week his team is “actively communicating” with New Hampshire’s public health agencies about the effort.

Neither the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services nor Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s office responded to the Bulletin’s requests for comment.

In August, a group of public health officials from eight states — Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania — met to discuss banding together and creating their own set of recommendations for vaccines separate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The effort comes amid concerns about the actions of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine critic appointed by President Donald Trump. In May, Kennedy announced the CDC would no longer recommend the COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children or pregnant women. In June, he fired 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, replacing many of them with vaccine skeptics. And, in August, he cut $500 million across 22 projects that sought to research mRNA vaccines for respiratory illnesses like influenza and COVID-19. Health officials throughout the country have decried the moves as dangerous and argued they’re not based in scientific fact.

Goldstein, speaking to a group of health journalists in Boston Monday, said the states’ August meeting was a continuation of discussions that had been ongoing all year.

“Back in January and February, states across the Northeast came together to start thinking about how we can operate and not replace CDC,” he said, “but backfill if parts of CDC start to fail and augment where CDC maybe wasn’t doing a good job in the first place.”

Goldstein described the group of state health officials as “a collaborative that has no name and a collaborative that is very cautious.”

“Nevertheless, we are a collaborative that has worked together on real, concrete issues,” he said.

Despite New Hampshire’s absence from the collaborative, Goldstein said communications continue with New Hampshire and other states.

“We’re having real conversations with red states, and they appreciate what we’re doing and lean on what we’re doing,” Goldstein said. “And also they can’t politically be the ones who are publicly coming out with the guidance.”

Goldstein said he expects the collaborative to expand. Indeed, since August’s meeting, Delaware has joined the group, Delaware Public Media reported this week.

“Folks in other parts of the country know what we’re doing,” he said. “They’re listening to us. They are interested in our recommendations, and I think we may end up as a much larger collaborative at the end.”

Earlier this morning, a group of Western states — California, Oregon, and Washington (Hawaii has since joined) — announced a similar but separate effort called the West Coast Health Alliance. That group of states have been more forthright in identifying their collaborative as a response to Kennedy and Trump’s. The governors of California, Oregon, and Washington released a joint statement: “President Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists — and his blatant politicization of the agency — is a direct assault on 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.”

Many in the public health field have expressed mixed feelings about the effort. They’re afraid of the impacts of Kennedy’s policies and the turmoil he’s created in the federal government’s public health apparatus, but also fearful of how conflicting health recommendations and guidance will confuse Americans.

Dr. Debra Houry was the chief medical officer and deputy director at the CDC until she, along with a group of other high level officials, resigned in protest over the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez. Asked by a Bulletin reporter about these two collaboratives, Houry said, “I get why people are doing it, but it’s going to cause some confusion and haves and have-nots.”

She also worries about “medical tourism by states” if providers decide to offer vaccines or other care only where it is recommended.

Dr. Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, called this “a balkanization of public health.” She compared it to gun policy.

“With firearms, they flow across state lines, which is why we see higher rates of firearms homicide and suicide in California after there are gun shows in Nevada,” Ranney said. “Similarly vaccinations, if you don’t have a group vaccinated in one state, it’s not like everyone in that state stays in that state. People move across state lines all the time.”