The US Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been undermining public health for decades. Still, a majority of Americans would have never noticed if not for the response to COVID. No one should trust their judgment or guidance, and the Trump Administration has tasked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with forging a path back.
Clean house. Close the laundromat. Make the agency credible. Focus on its limited remit and base that on actual science. It is a huge task, and they have very little time to complete it, but we know they are making positive strides; the swap rats in Congress and the industries that capture them are losing their minds.
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey announced this week that her state knew better than the Federal government how to address the matter of vaccines and the childhood vaccine schedule. I knew that she was dipping a big, hairy Bay State toe into States’ rights waters, but not exactly, which prompted someone to send me a link to this.
In just six months, Washington State has constructed a legal and operational framework that enables mass vaccination…and in some cases without parental consent, without local oversight, and without public debate. The pieces are already in place.
It is called the West Coast Health Alliance, and it includes Washington State, Oregon, California, and not Hawaii.
The West Coast Health Alliance was formed in direct response to federal leadership changes at the CDC. Governors from Washington, Oregon, and California condemned what they described as the politicization of science and pledged to issue unified vaccine guidance rooted in recommendations from professional associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. While the Alliance claims to uphold scientific integrity, it also bypasses traditional federal oversight and advisory bodies. This shift allows regional mandates to be issued without national consensus, and it redefines dissent as misinformation—effectively silencing alternative viewpoints and parental concerns.
States most likely to impose school closures, lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates (don’t forget to follow the arrows on the grocery store floor) are forming a Public Health confederacy, their leaders are free to ignore, but residents may not.
I see no reason why New Mexico, Colorado, and other blue dumpster fire states can’t exercise their sovereign right to climb on the same trainwreck the way they did with California’s EV transportation emission mandates. Ignore the Feds en masse and create your own regional CDC. Do your own thing.
It is a blatant admission that states have the right not to do what the Federal government tries to force upon them, which, ironically, in this instance, is the right to do what you think is best.
Put another way, you just validated Dobbs.
State governments have the right to decide most of what happens to citizens in those states where the US Constitution and federal law make no claims (and the law is not somehow deemed unconstitutional). That last bit will prove interesting. There are federal laws that give power to the chief executive and the agencies they oversee.
Democrats went out of their way to craft an obscene volume of new laws under their Obama Democrat Congressional majority 2009-2010, in which the words Secretary Shall became part of the collective consciousness. Democratic governors and legislatures applauded. Still, when the Secretary is RFKJ or anyone else in Trump’s cabinet, it is suddenly a reason to read the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
I get that we give the Trump Administration far too much credit for manipulating Democrats into doing things, but was this war-gamed? The more Blue States jump to denounce federal oversight with which they disagree, the stronger the case for a long list of things Red States would love to shed as well.
At the same time, it becomes markedly clearer what Democrats mean by Democracy and at what cost. If states are not obligated to bend the knee to federal oversight, they are acknowledging their own obligation to fund them. All of them. The DC grant and funding mill was created to tie states’ hands to federal mandates.
So, by all means, please lead the vanguard. Create a Public Health Confederacy. But don’t be surprised when you lose more seats in Congress because actual citizens, overwhelmed by your inability to manage “public health” and offended by your draconian mandates, migrate to red states.
