Colorado, New Mexico Lawmakers Move to Control States’ Vaccine Guidelines

Lawmakers in Colorado and New Mexico are working to base state vaccine guidance on recommendations beyond the CDC’s revised schedule.

by Jill Erzen

Lawmakers in Colorado and New Mexico moved this week to extend state vaccine guidance beyond new federal recommendations. Critics warned that the changes lock in liability protections and push parents to the sidelines.

The Colorado Senate Health and Human Services Committee on Thursday approved a bill “promoting immunization access.” The bill allows the state to adopt vaccine guidelines based on recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and “other similar entities,” The Colorado Square reported.

The bill also extends liability protections for vaccine manufacturers and providers for injuries or deaths that occur from shots that follow the state’s recommendations. The bill will next go before the full Senate for debate.

Critics of the proposal pressed lawmakers early in Thursday’s hearing to confront what they claimed the bill leaves unsaid.

Pam Long, the mother of a vaccine-injured child, told the committee that vaccine liability protections are “bankrupting this state.”

In her testimony, Long told the committee, “I’ll tell you where the liability is. It’s on me. It’s on 17,000, potentially, people in the state of Colorado,” referring to parents of vaccine-injured children. She added:

“I’m here to give voice to those people, as opposed to the pharma-lobbyists you just heard from. It’s bankrupting this state. It’s bankrupting talent. It’s bankrupting parents. We are 24-7 caregivers. You might think it’s rare, but it’s lifelong.”

Katy LeVasseur challenged the logic behind expanding immunity from lawsuits. “If vaccines are so safe, why does every entity that has a part in their administration need to have liability protection?” she asked. “If this vaccine liability protection is so desired, then you are admitting that vaccine injury and death are real.”

She noted that the bill repeatedly specifies who is not liable for injury or death, with “no mention of who is.”

LeVasseur also highlighted public opposition to the bill. “There were over a dozen members of the public who came and spoke against the bill, both in person and remotely, outnumbering those who spoke for the bill. This was a good showing considering the extreme short notice, though I’m guessing that was by design,” she told The Defender.

LeVasseur criticized the pace of the process, as well. “They appear to be rushing this bill through,” she said.

LeVasseur stressed that public engagement remains crucial. “We can’t sit back and be quiet,” she said. “We will be watching the bill’s next steps and continue to rally local advocates to raise a voice against it.”

‘There is no scarcity’ of access to vaccines

Under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, manufacturers and providers receive broad protection from lawsuits for vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for routine use.

The Colorado bill would effectively mirror those shields at the state level, even when the state relies on schedules that are inconsistent with federal guidance.

​​State Sen. Lindsey Daugherty, a sponsor of the bill, said the measure counters recent federal changes that she said sowed uncertainty among providers and patients.

“For decades, our state’s immunization system has relied on stable federal guidance,” Daugherty said at the hearing. “However, recent shifts have created confusion and uncertainty for both Coloradans and the dedicated health care professionals who administer vaccines.”

In January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said changes to the childhood immunization schedule allow for “more flexibility and choice, with less coercion.”

HHS said the CDC will continue to recommend that all children are immunized against the 10 “most serious diseases” plus varicella (chickenpox). Recommendations for high-risk groups will remain unchanged, officials said.

Vaccines no longer routinely recommended moved to the shared clinical decision-making category. Those include rotavirus, COVID-19, influenza, meningococcal disease, hepatitis A and hepatitis B.

The updated approach contrasts with the CDC child and adolescent schedule at the end of 2024, which recommended 17 immunizations for all children.

Daugherty called the evolving guidelines a disruption that threatens vaccine access, risks inconsistency across providers and weakens public confidence.

She said the bill “modernizes Colorado law” to protect access to vaccines and ensure “consistent guidance across all care settings.”

“It achieves this by allowing Colorado to explicitly rely on the trusted evidence-based guidelines from leading medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics,” she said.

In her closing remarks, Daugherty stated that she is pregnant and due next week. She said her husband’s “sole job” at the hospital is to ensure their baby “has all of the vaccines” that their 2-year-old received as a newborn.

State Sen. Kyle Mullica, a sponsor of the Colorado bill, blamed federal health agencies for “the dysfunction that is coming out of Washington.”

“We’ve seen the fact that they are arbitrarily changing schedules, arbitrarily changing policies that are impacting our states and are impacting our ability to protect the people of our state and take away the ability for the people in Colorado to have access to vaccines,” he said in his closing remarks.

Long said the bill is not about access. “There is no scarcity,” Long said, citing HHS assurances that all currently recommended vaccines will remain available and fully covered by insurance.

New Mexico moves to cement reliance on AAP vaccine guidance

In New Mexico, lawmakers are considering whether to make permanent a temporary shift away from exclusive reliance on federal vaccine recommendations, Source NM reported.

The legislature adopted a bill in October 2025 allowing the state to follow vaccine guidance based on the AAP and other professional organizations, in addition to ACIP. The law included a sunset clause of July 1, 2026.

On Thursday, the House Consumer and Public Affairs Committee voted to repeal that clause.

“Since we can’t depend on the feds right now to provide that guidance, we will rely on the American Academy of Pediatrics and the [New Mexico] Department of Health,” state Rep. Liz Thomson said at the hearing, according to Source NM.

Critics questioned whether locking in the change serves families over the long term.

“Why the permanent change?” asked Rep. John Block. “I don’t know who’s going to be on the boards of these groups in the future. … What if they get taken over by a bunch of people who don’t believe in vaccines at all?”

Thomson said making the law permanent would simply “broaden” the sources the state consults.

In an October 2025 message to the Senate, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said the changes in the bill “are vital to safeguarding the health and safety of New Mexicans in light of the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ failure to follow science and make timely and necessary vaccine recommendations.”

Grisham added that “preventing our children from getting life-saving vaccines … is unacceptable.”

More states align vaccine recommendations with new AAP guidelines

A growing number of states said they will not follow the CDC’s revised childhood vaccine recommendations.

Since the CDC’s January announcement to shift some vaccines to “shared clinical decision-making,” at least 20 states have said they will not adopt the new CDC schedule.

In addition to Colorado and New Mexico, these include California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

Most of those states plan to follow vaccine guidance issued by the AAP, CIDRAP reported.

The AAP on Monday released its 2026 immunization schedule, which recommends routine vaccination against 18 diseases.

The organization is part of a coalition of major medical groups suing U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over changes Kennedy made to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The lawsuit seeks to disband the panel, overturn its recent recommendations and rebuild it under court supervision.

In January, Children’s Health Defense and five other plaintiffs sued the AAP, accusing the organization of running a decades-long racketeering scheme to defraud families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule.

The AAP is funded in large part by Big Pharma, with Merck, Moderna, Pfizer, Sanofi and CSL Seqirus each giving $50,000 or more.

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