By Dan Levine, Chad Terhune
-Dr. Ali Sherif normally gives about 50 doses of the measles vaccine to children each month at his clinic in Hobbs, New Mexico, near the Texas state line.
The number of shots at his clinic has surged about 25%, however, in recent weeks as local parents seek immunizations to protect their toddlers and school-age children from a growing measles outbreak that has infected more than 600 people and led to three deaths.
Like thousands of other doctors across the country, Sherif relies on a little-known federal program to ensure he has those shots on hand for families at no cost to them.
The Vaccines for Children program is funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and administered by state public health officials. With an annual budget of roughly $5 billion, the vaccines program is responsible for about half the jabs administered to U.S. children every year.
The initiative funds vaccine purchases from drug manufacturers including Merck and GlaxoSmithKline at a discount, while state health departments implement the program and enroll medical providers. A dose of MMR vaccine costs about $26 under the program compared to $95 in the private sector, according to a CDC price list.
But ongoing cuts in federal health funding and personnel could jeopardize the effectiveness of this longstanding program that’s become a key cog in America’s disease-fighting machinery, according to disease experts and former CDC officials.
The Trump administration recently fired about 10,000 employees at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including significant reductions at CDC that are part of a massive downsizing of the federal workforce. HHS has said another 10,000 left voluntarily.
The CDC employees who staff the children’s vaccine program were largely untouched, three sources familiar with the situation said. However, about 20 others were fired who comprised a unit that helped promote the program in communities at high risk of infectious disease, including during the current outbreak, these sources said. These employees helped bolster the confidence in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, they said.
At the same time, HHS canceled about $11 billion in COVID-related grants to state and local health departments that were used for a wide variety of vaccine-related clinics and outreach activities, including for measles. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the cuts in some states.
Dr. David Sugerman, a senior scientist leading the CDC’s measles response, highlighted COVID-19 funding cuts before a federal advisory panel last week. “We are scraping to find the resources and personnel needed to provide support to Texas, and other jurisdictions,” he said.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has overseen these significant reductions in force and budget after casting doubt on vaccine safety for years. During the current measles outbreak, he has promoted unproven treatments while giving a tepid endorsement of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
HHS and the White House did not respond to requests for comment, nor did GlaxoSmithKline. A Merck spokesman declined to comment.
FREE SHOTS
Congress created the Vaccines for Children program in 1993 after a U.S. measles epidemic had killed dozens of children a few years earlier. The CDC found that more than half of the children who got measles then were unvaccinated. The cost of the immunization was a primary reason families had skipped the shot even though they were seeing doctors regularly, according to the agency.
At one large pediatric clinic in Albuquerque, manager Shawna Maestas said she orders about $100,000 worth of various vaccines each month through the federal program.
“We’ve had quite a big uptick in vaccine administration lately,” she said. “But if families had to pay for it, they would push it off.”
Over the past decade, Texas has administered 5.6 million doses of the MMR vaccine through the program, according to state data provided to Reuters. New Mexico has received nearly 364,000 doses of the MMR vaccine over the same time period, records show.
A spokesman for the New Mexico health department said “vaccine supply and distribution have continued with no interruptions.”
Texas officials said on Tuesday that the state’s measles outbreak had grown to 624 cases, including 64 who were hospitalized. Two unvaccinated children with no underlying health conditions have died in the state, including an 8-year-old girl who died earlier this month.
New Mexico officials have tallied 65 cases and one death of an unvaccinated adult. These are the first deaths from measles in the United States since 2015.
Dr. Alex Cvijanovich, a pediatrician in Albuquerque, said New Mexico has one of the nation’s highest rates of childhood poverty and says she is terrified about what could happen if the children’s vaccine program is scaled back.
As a doctor in training more than 20 years ago, she cared for a teen boy who died from a degenerative neurological condition linked to his measles infection as an infant, when he was too young to be vaccinated.
“There are really bad, scary things that we can protect our children from,” she said.
In Hobbs, New Mexico, Sherif says about 85% of his patients are on Medicaid, the federal and state health insurance program for low-income Americans. His clinic orders about $50,000 worth of measles, chickenpox and other vaccines per month through the program, he says, an amount of money impossible for his small clinic to afford if not covered by the federal program.
“If I were to buy them by myself, I would not get enough for my patients,” he said.
(Reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco and Chad Terhune in Los Angeles; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Michael Learmonth)
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