Skip to main content
Oregon, Washington and California announced today they will coordinate to provide residents with reliable vaccine information—a response, they say, to the Trump administration’s destruction of the credibility and scientific integrity of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
“President Donald 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 governors of the three states said in a written statement. “The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences. California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk.”
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, public health has become a major political battleground in America. Vaccines are widely credited with saving millions of lives during the crisis. But a backlash also fed the political rise of vaccine skeptics like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump has appointed to run the nation’s public health.
Kennedy says he is working to restore public trust in a CDC whose once-noble mission has become mired in bureaucratic inertia, politicized science and mission creep, and which has presided over high levels of chronic disease.
In practice, he has gutted vaccine research funding, and remade in his own image the CDC advisory body that makes recommendations regarding vaccines. In recent days, he moved to fire the head of the CDC, whose lawyers have said she was targeted because she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” Numerous past CDC leaders, including one from the first Trump administration, have condemned Kennedy’s leadership, saying he is endangering the health of every American.
In a news release, the western governors say an impaired CDC has left a vacuum of clear, evidence-based vaccine guidance: Manufacturers lack reliable information to plan production, health care providers struggle to provide consistent plans of care, and families face uncertainty about access and coverage.
It is in response to this that they have formed their “Western Health Alliance.” The states say they are bound by a commitment to ensuring that public health recommendations are guided by safety, efficacy, transparency, access and trust. Each state, according to the news release, will independently pursue strategies shaped by their own politics and laws. But the idea is to provide residents with consistent, science-based vaccine recommendations they can rely on, regardless of shifting federal actions.
In the coming weeks, the states plan to “finalize shared principles to strengthen public confidence in vaccines and in public health.” Ultimately, they say, they will coordinate health guidelines by aligning immunization recommendations, informed by respected national medical organizations.
