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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [techdirt.com]:

Policy [techdirt.com]

At the beginning of this year, the Colorado state legislature introduced HB25-1097 [colorado.gov], a state law that updated the state’s disease control statutes. Eventually signed into law by the Governor in April, the bill does a whole bunch of things related to public health: repealed the state’s epidemic response committee, set a schedule for reviewing the state’s emergency plans every three years, and all sorts of things having to do with child immunization rules. Those include things like creating an official school record for immunization after doctor’s records of immunization are received, how camping organizations keep their own records for immunization for out of state campers, and so on. Mostly pretty yawn-inducing stuff.

But it also included this:

Direct the state board of health, in adopting rules establishing immunization requirements, to take into consideration, as appropriate and in addition to the recommendations of the advisory committee on immunization practices, the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American College of Physicians;

That reference to the advisory committee on immunization practices is more commonly known as the CDC’s ACIP. That would be the committee for which RFK Jr. fired all 17 members [techdirt.com] and replaced them with 8 new members [techdirt.com], several of which are vaccine disinformation peddlers.

While this law and this provision of it largely flew under the radar, its purpose is now being shown and highlighted as a way to combat Kennedy and HHS’ nonsense [cpr.org]. Other states need to pay attention here.

This is a good start. Essentially, Colorado’s legislation presents something of a no-confidence vote in the CDC and HHS, choosing to open up guidance that had previously been limited to those agencies to incorporate NGOs that actually have public health and science in mind. Other states adopting similar laws would be useful both in maintaining good guidance on a state level and in highlighting yet again how much valid distrust of RFK Jr.’s leadership exists.

Ashish Jha, Biden’s COVID response coordinator and the dean of Brown University School of Public Health, highlights that this is about much more [washingtonpost.com] than keeping the public supplied with good scientific information. The game Kennedy is really playing isn’t one in which he makes vaccines entirely unauthorized or disappeared. Instead, he’ll just make them so expensive that few people can afford them.

As Jha notes further in the post, laws like the Colorado law can only be step 1. Step 2 needs to be state-level regulation of insurance companies in order to ensure the Kennedy’s plan to price vaccines out of reach for most people isn’t successful.

This is by no means a perfect plan. States will vary in their coverage and their guidance. The residents in some states, particular their children, will live under worse conditions than others. Not all citizens will have the same healthcare available to them. In states where science is sneered at in the same manner as Kennedy’s HHS, some people, including children, will die.

But this is the reality in front of us. If no action is taken and this version of the CDC is allowed to convince the public that vaccines are the devil, or if vaccines are simply made too expensive to be widely adopted, the end result could be just what James Carville recently predicted [thehill.com].

If a patchwork of state laws can stave off that nightmare from reality, so be it.

Original Submission