At least 20 states have said they are using guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical associations when setting vaccine policies and immunization schedules, in some cases supplementing or diverging from recommendations issued by the Trump administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Colorado is already among the 20, but Democratic lawmakers this week also approved a bill that will require the state Board of Health to consider recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups, as well as from a federal advisory committee that was recently changed to include vaccine skeptics.

Senate Bill 32 passed the Senate Health & Human Services Committee on a party-line vote on Jan. 29 and was approved by the Senate this week, also on a party-line vote. It now heads to the House.

There’s much more to the bill than the vaccine recommendations. It doesn’t add any vaccine mandates nor change any of the exceptions in current law. Under SB 32, pharmacists would have independent authority to offer immunizations.

It also updates liability provisions for vaccines required for school entry, allowing compliance with either the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention immunization schedule or the schedule established by the State Board of Health.

The CDC last month announced “an overhaul of the immunization schedule,” paring the number of recommended immunizations from 17 to 11, according to the University of Minnesota‘s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

The CDC decision follows Kennedy’s June decision to fire all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, and replace them with people, some of whom are vaccine skeptics. That newly configured advisory committee includes, among its contractors, one of the witnesses at the Jan. 29 hearing on SB 32.

The CDC’s updated schedule no longer recommends vaccines for children who are not at high risk of respiratory syncytial virus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, dengue, or bacterial meningitis.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment already lists the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommended vaccine schedule on its website, rather than the CDC’s updated list.

In a letter to providers, the state’s department of health recommended that families and providers follow the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, “which is developed by infectious disease experts and reflects decades of peer-reviewed evidence and safety monitoring.”

The state Board of Health in December updated its rules to incorporate the 2025 AAP schedule on school and child care immunization requirements, which it called “the gold standard for pediatric care in the U.S.”

SB 32 sponsor Sen. Lindsey Daugherty, D-Arvada, is days away from delivering her second child, due Feb. 3. She told the health committee that for decades, the state’s immunization system has relied on stable federal guidance, but recent changes now threaten vaccine access, creates the risk of inconsistency across providers “and weakens public confidence in a system design to protect us all.”

SB 32 will allow the state’s department of health to continue buying, “recommending and conducting outreach for vaccines based on established science, even if federal guidance is in flux,” she said.

Co-sponsor Sen. Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton, an emergency room nurse, added that vaccines have put diseases like polio in the history books, but the nation risks losing decades of progress in the current uncertain climate. He noted that the U.S. declared measles eliminated in 2000, but a recent outbreak has led to hundreds of cases and deaths of children and adults nationwide. Colorado has seen 36 cases, 24 of which affected people who were not vaccinated.

Samantha Hochman is a single mom in Denver with three daughters. She told the committee she has no terrible stories of her children being afflicted with horrible diseases “because my children are fully vaccinated.”

In advocating for SB 32, Dr. Edwin Asturias is a pediatrician and infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital Colorado. He noted the days when a child is paralyzed by polio, or hospitalized for measles or COVID, are distant because of vaccines.

But the shift in federal policy means vaccine recommendations are unstable, and that’s led to falling vaccination rates, he said. He noted the flu season is the worst in 25 years, with 32 deaths of children, including three in Colorado.

Vaccine rates for flu and measles are both dropping, he said. “As a pediatrician, I have cared for infants dehydrated from coronavirus to totally struggling to breathe with RSV and previously healthy school-age children, fighting for their lives against meningitis. These are not abstract statistics,” he said.

“I knew people with polio” years ago, said Dr. David Downs, who’s affiliated with the American College of Physicians. He had measles as a child, with a fever of 105. But with all his medical training and time as a physician, he’s never seen a case of polio, measles, diphtheria, tetanus, or mumps.

Those opposed to SB 32 included Cynthia Nevison, a climate researcher with the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and a contractor with the ACIP on Hepatitis B vaccines, according to Politico.

In December, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research, Nevison told attendees at a two-day ACIP meeting that Hepatitis B is “primarily a concern for babies of ‘foreign-born’ mothers and said it can occur in some ‘high-risk immigrant families,’ stressing that there was little risk that the ‘average American child’ would contract the virus from siblings or other relatives.” 

She told the health committee that “unbiased science” increasingly recognizes that an “aggressive US childhood immunization schedule” is an important cause of many of the hyperreactive immune system disorders and neuro-immune conditions that increasingly affect and disable children. She also praised Kennedy for dedicating himself “to reversing the tragic decline in children’s health.”

Many Coloradans support Secretary Kennedy and applaud the reforms he is making, Nevison added, citing a 13% COVID booster shot rate in Colorado as evidence.

Colorado should embrace the new recommendations rather than try to thwart them, she said.

Other witnesses claimed the bill is the work of Big Pharma, pointing to funding received by some of the medical groups from the pharmaceutical industry.

Julie Denton of the Colorado Health Choice Alliance pointed to corporate donors, all in the vaccine business, to the American Academy of Pediatrics, and other medical groups whose vaccine recommendations would be covered under SB 32. “These aren’t neutral entities,” she said of the medical groups. “Granting them state-sanctioned authority over vaccine recommendations is deeply troubling,” Denton added.

Witnesses opposed to SB 32 also suggested that expanding the liability protections might not be legal.

At the hearing’s conclusion, Mullica pointed out he’s no friend of Big Pharma. “This is about protecting kids,” he said.