The January 20 Executive Order pausing United States foreign development assistance for a 90-day review effectively stopped work on a wide variety of U.S.-supported global health security programs, including routine immunizations. While the Secretary of State’s January 29 emergency waiver specified that “implementers of existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs should continue or resume work if they have stopped,” the extent to which support for vaccinations to prevent infectious disease is covered is unclear. A February 4 USAID information memo outlining Bureau for Global Health programming that will continue under the waiver singles out “essential immunizations to prevent imminent mortality” for newborns and children, but work related to transporting vaccines, analyzing data related to immunization coverage, supporting health workers to administer vaccines, and reaching populations in remote, hard-to-reach districts is not described. Yet with measles outbreaks being reported in the U.S. and abroad, and with coverage of the 3rd dose of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine still lower than before the Covid-19 pandemic, ensuring countries have the support needed to deliver vaccines to populations at risk of vaccine preventable disease remains a high priority to both stop outbreaks overseas and protect global health security.
Please join the CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Global Health Security on Wednesday, February 19, from 4:00 to 4:45 PM ET, for a broadcast conversation with Nidhi Bouri, former Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health, USAID; Grace Chee, former Director of the MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity (MRITE); and William Moss, Professor and Executive Director of the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, regarding the current state of routine immunizations programs and the impacts of the recent executive orders on U.S. foreign assistance and global health. Katherine E. Bliss, CSIS Senior Fellow and Director, Immunizations and Health Systems Resilience with the Global Health Policy Center, will moderate.
This event is made possible through the generous support of the Gates Foundation.
