By John Ingold | Colorado Sun
An amendment slipped into a bill by Democrats would shift reliance away from a key federal committee in determining which vaccines Colorado schoolkids are required to get
Colorado lawmakers have quietly moved to shift the state’s school immunization requirements away from the recommendations of a prominent federal committee, in response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. taking over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The move comes in an amendment to a bill, House Bill 1027, currently awaiting Gov. Jared Polis’ signature. The amendment makes a change to how Colorado decides which vaccines to require.
Colorado’s Board of Health sets the rules for which vaccines schoolkids need to receive or to have a valid exemption for. The current law says the board should do that “based on recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the federal Department of Health and Human Services.”
The committee, known as ACIP, plays a major role in reviewing safety and efficacy data on vaccines and deciding whether to recommend their use. Historically, the committee has been composed of doctors who broadly support vaccination, including a few from Colorado.
But the committee’s future is less certain with Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic, at the helm of HHS. An ACIP meeting originally scheduled for February was postponed for two months before being rescheduled for next week. And Kennedy has attacked ACIP’s members, claiming they are hobbled by conflicts of interest. (The committee has conflict-disclosure and recusal rules.)