Going its own way on COVID vaccines

California pushes back against restrictive new federal guidelines that it says can’t be trusted.

- By Ronc-Gonc Lin II

CARLIN STIEHL For The Times BREIONA LANG administers a COVID-19 shot at an L.A. clinic in September 2024. New federal vaccine guidelines have fueled criticism.

California's late summer COVID surge is showing signs of peaking, but the state's war with the Trump administration over vaccines is just beginning.

Coronavirus levels in California’s wastewater remain “very high,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as they are in much of the country. But some other COVID indicators are starting to fall in the Golden State.

The shift comes as California state officials and mainstream medical organizations are breaking from the Trump administration's recent revisions to federal vaccine guidelines.

The changes, made under the leadership of vaccine-skeptic Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have been so dramatic that a number of medical experts and officials now express little to no confidence in two key agencies within that department: the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration.

A key turning point came in June, when Kennedy ousted everyone on the CDC's respected Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which issues recommendations on who should receive various types of vaccines.

Their replacements some of whom have criticized vaccines and spread misinformation, according to the Associated Press have led officials and other experts in some states to doubt or dismiss the latest CDC guidance.

The CDC’s immunization committee “is no longer a trusted source for vaccine guidance,” Dr. Matt Willis, the former public health officer for Marin County, wrote on the blog Your Local Epidemiologist in California.