by Carolyn Hendler, JD - August 8, 2023 Source: Childhood Vaccination Programs Face Major Cuts in Federal Funding – The Vaccine Reaction
State vaccination programs for children will face a reduction in funding from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grants. The federal immunization grant program, which funds the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program, totaled approximately $680 million last year.1
The reduction in funding is alleged to be due to the debt ceiling deal reached by Congress and the Biden administration. The deal took back about $27 billion in unspent federal money dedicated to COVID-19 and reduced state funding to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases by $400 million.2
State Electronic Vaccine Tracking Databases Lose Funding
Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, said that the reduction in federal funding will specifically affect the “immunization information systems program,” which include federally monitored state based electronic databases used to track the vaccination status of children, specifically the numbers of doses of vaccines a child receives. The budget cuts are expected to range from 10 percent to 37 percent of the overall expected funding for the grant year.3
Hannan said:
This is pretty unprecedented; it was completely unexpected… we have a lot of concerns.
According to Hannan, the electronic vaccine data tracking system was improved due additional federal funding during the COVID pandemic, which will be in effect until 2025.
In Philadelphia, PhilaVax , the electronic vaccine database that keeps track of the vaccines children have have received, will lose $670,000 in federal funds. Left-over money from federal COVID relief funds, which were originally allocated for vaccination and the tracking of COVID shots, will temporarily make up the lost funds.4
The State of Washington faces steeper cuts, as much as a $2.5 million reduction in federal funding for its vaccine tracking registry, which is 20 percent of the Washington Department of Health’s vaccination budget. The registry aids in distributing vaccines under the federally funded childhood vaccine program.5
Some public health officials are concerned about the budget cuts to the state electronic vaccine tracking databases because childhood vaccination rates have fallen in recent years.6 The percent of children entering kindergarten having received eight federally recommended vaccines decreased by one percent in the last year. At the start of the 2021-2022 school year, 93 percent of kindergarteners had received the MMR, DTaP, polio and varicella vaccines compared to 94 percent of kindergarteners at the start of the 2019-2020 school year.7
Budget Cutbacks for Childhood Vaccination Programs are Part of Broader Health Care Spending Cuts
The reduction in federal funding grants to state vaccination programs is part of larger federal funding cuts to the CDC’s budget of about $1.3 billion. The exact amount of funding cuts has not been determined because the debt ceiling deal accounting is in the process of being finalized.8
Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists lamented…
We’re falling even faster than I ever thought we would into the boom and bust cycle of funding public health. It is exceedingly troubling that we have a lot less than we thought we were going to have at a time when we need it most.9
A CDC spokesperson pointed out that there are other sources of federal funding available, such as the Public Health Infrastructure Grant that gave almost $4 billion to health departments to modernize electronic data systems and foundational capabilities and support workplace development.
Despite the reassurance from the CDC, Hamilton worried…
At this moment, we have sadly seen an erosion in the community’s trust of public health, and rebuilding that trust is more important than ever. Public health often serves as a safety net, and the community needs to see and feel the services that it offers in order to trust it. It’s allowing people to see public health as a group that’s going to be there through thick and thin thin to help them, and you need funds to do that.10
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