Massachusetts bucks HHS, issuing its own COVID guidelines
Governor Maura Healey speaks at this year's BIO conference in Boston.
Amid national confusion and consternation about recent changes to COVID-19 vaccine guidelines in the United States, Governor Maura Healey has made Massachusetts the first state in the Union to require insurers to cover the vaccine for everyone.
In a budget supplement filed last month, Healey also changed state law and policy to permit the Massachusetts Department of Health, rather than the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices, to dictate vaccine permissions and recommendations.
“Massachusetts has the best healthcare in the world,” Healy said in a statement. “We won’t let Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy get between patients and their doctors. When the federal government fails to protect public health, Massachusetts will step up. The actions we are announcing today will make sure people can continue to get the vaccines they need and want in Massachusetts.”
In addition to mandating insurance coverage of vaccines, the administration is working with CVS and Walgreens to make sure COVID vaccine appointments are available soon to Bay Staters.
Last week, the FDA announced that new COVID-19 vaccine formulations would only be approved for those over 65 or those at high risk due to other conditions. Previously they were available to everyone over 6 months of age due to emergency authorisation.
While HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has maintained that the vaccine is still available to those who want it, in practice the combination of the narrow FDA approval and open questions about pending recommendations from the CDC have kept the boosters from being available in pharmacies and doctors’ offices, even for those who are over 65.
This is partly because, as a matter of course, those recommendations affect how many doses are created, ordered, and delivered, as well as whether the shots are covered by insurers.
At a Congressional hearing yesterday, Senators from both sides of the aisle crticised the policy changes, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren who called on Kennedy to resign at the end of a heated exchange about vaccine availability.
Massachusetts, a liberal state with a Democratic governor and a Democrat-controlled legislature, is the first to take this level of action in opposition to HHS’s COVID vaccine pivot, but it likely won’t be the last. According to the Boston Globe, Massachusetts is working with Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Delaware to coordinate a consistent regional vaccine policy, and similar discussions are happening in Vermont, Maine, New Jersey, and New York, as well as on the west coast in California, Oregon, and Washington. On the other hand, the state of Florida recently announced a planned end to all vaccine mandates.
