Every year, Vaccinate Your Family distributes a State of the ImmUnion report to help examine the strength of our country’s defenses against vaccine-preventable diseases, and what we can do, as public health advocates and policymakers, to make our country stronger and more resilient in the face of emerging health threats. Vaccinate Your Family recently released its sixth annual State of the ImmUnion (SOTI) Report. The 2022 report presents the ongoing challenges our nation faces and the policies that can help remedy the barriers to timely immunizations.
The SOTI highlights several action items and points for consideration broken down as follows:
- Rebuilding Immunization Infrastructure
“Congress has made significant investments in outreach over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably in the American Rescue Plan, which provided $1.9 trillion to fight the pandemic. While those funds have been used to both educate and vaccinate people against COVID in every state, they have not been sufficient to build a robust, lasting infrastructure to protect our country against future epidemics, pandemics and other public health threats.”
- Ensuring Timely Access to Recommended Vaccines
“The COVID-19 vaccine distribution effort has taught us the importance of increasing access to vaccines. Providing the vaccine at no cost to patients - with a reasonable reimbursement rate for healthcare providers - has both increased people’s willingness to be vaccinated and increased the number of locations at which they can be vaccinated. Yet this is a lesson that has not yet been implemented for all routinely recommended vaccines.”
- Reigniting a Culture of Immunization
“Perhaps at no other time in our history has immunizations been so critical in protecting public health. However, at this crucial moment, Americans are growing more distrustful of government and public healthxiv, jeopardizing our ability to protect ourselves and return to pre-pandemic life. Now, more than ever, Congress must act to share science-based vaccine information with their constituents.”
- The State of Our ImmUnion is Resilient
“We can bounce back stronger from the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, but we must act now to build a robust public health infrastructure, ensure equitable access to vaccines and counteract misinformation.”
Vaccinate Your Family, through their State of the ImmUnion publication, addresses the most pressing issues in the realm of immunizations today. NACCHO supports Vaccinate Your Family’s efforts in educating everyone on the importance of immunizations, while working to strengthen the community’s protection against vaccine-preventable diseases.
Visit the Vaccinate Your Family webpage to access the full SOTI report.
