Minnesota Health Commissioner: Walz executive order aims to improve vaccine access
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Governor Tim Walz issued an executive order this week promising to preserve access to vaccines in Minnesota.
The move comes after the Food and Drug Administration announced new rules limiting new COVID vaccines to people who are 65 years and older or who have other specified health problems.
Walz's executive order instructs Minnesota's health care providers to continue to offer vaccines under their own medical judgement. And it instructs the Minnesota Department of Health to work with other state agencies to remove barriers to access.
For more on what that will look like, MPR News host Emily Bright spoke with Minnesota Health Commissioner Brooke Cunningham.
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Press play above to listen to their conversation, or read a transcript below, edited for time and clarity.
The governor's executive order says MDH will issue its own vaccine guidelines by September 24. That's two weeks away. So if a listener wants to go out and get a vaccine right now, will they be able to do that, or should they wait for those new guidelines?
So what we plan to do on the 24th is not so much guidelines but a standing order or protocol that will provide practitioners, pharmacists, nurses or folks who may not have a prescribing provider, like a physician, to be able to write a prescription for patients. It will give them clarity that they can indeed prescribe and administer vaccines.
Does either the federal mandate or this new state order change anything about the way vaccines are covered under insurance?
That's why the executive order asked us to really engage with our fellow state agencies and also with payers. What often happens is the vaccines that are approved by the FDA are the ones that are paid for. We have seen some insurance companies across the country say that they're going to still cover COVID-19 vaccines for everybody, but we want to make sure that is indeed still the case for Minnesotans.
We're talking about breaking with the federal government's guidelines and removing barriers. Can you elaborate on what work you have ahead of you?
So when we talk about breaking from the federal government's guidelines, as you mentioned at the top, they have really limited access to COIVD vaccines. Certainly our professional associations have already broken from those guidelines. For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics says that the very youngest kids, the children under two years old, should have access to vaccinations. And they're saying that because when they look at national data, it shows that of children under two years old, over half of those who were hospitalized [for COVID] did not have an underlying condition.
Hence, the American Academy of Pediatrics is saying, “Let's immunize our young children under two years old,” right? But that's not currently what the federal guidelines say. So we are tracking what our professional associations and trusted colleagues are saying, who are certainly following evidence-based recommendations, who are thinking about population health and who do differ from the federal government.
The University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy has looked at over 600 studies that, again, show that vaccines are safe and efficacious. In this time when we want to keep people safe, we want people to be able to get vaccines if they want them.
While I have you, is there any other misinformation that you'd like to address?
You know, someone said to me recently, the challenge for us and public health as a state health authority is that misinformation is free. It’s widely accessible. But the accurate information — the science — is often behind a paywall. And our role as a public health agency with partners is to really make sure that we bring what is behind the paywall forward, and that we work with partners to do that.
