Trump cuts KC vaccine funding as measles spreads in Kansas. ‘No rational reason'

Yahoo

05-04-2025

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Nurture KC wanted to develop a booklet for pregnant women with information about what vaccinations they should get during pregnancy so their immunity will transfer to their babies.
The Kansas City nonprofit, which focuses on reducing infant mortality and improving family health, was also looking at a research project to study vaccine uptake. And it had planned to offer COVID-19 shots during a community baby shower this spring.
'Clearly, that's going to be off the table now,' executive director Tracy Russell said.
President Donald Trump's administration in late March abruptly canceled a $250,000 grant awarded to Nurture KC. The decision was part of a wave of nationwide public health grant terminations that came as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has sought to undercut confidence in vaccines, asserts control as the new secretary of Health and Human Services, or HHS.
The cancellations represent a blow to vaccination and public health efforts in the Kansas City area – and come as Kansas grapples with a measles outbreak that's infected at least 23 people. No cases have been reported in the Kansas City metro, but doctors and health providers are preparing for how to respond if the highly contagious virus begins spreading locally.
A federal judge in Rhode Island on Thursday said she planned to temporarily block the Trump administration from cutting billions in public health dollars across the country, the Associated Press reported. The decision came in a lawsuit that seeks to stop the cuts and could be reversed or overruled later.
For now, the grant terminations have sent Kansas City-area health officials scrambling to determine the potential fallout for the region.
Jackson County Public Health lost about $1.1 million in funding, the agency said. The cuts will reduce its ability to monitor disease trends in high-risk settings like nursing homes and schools and its ability to hold vaccine clinics with its mobile unit. Three jobs have been lost, the agency said.
The Kansas Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics lost a roughly $270,000 grant helping fund a variety of projects, such as a series of webinars that would have included one focused on measles to provide continuing education to health professionals. Pediatricians and other doctors interviewed over the past week voiced deep concern that the grant cuts are hitting vaccine education efforts at an especially critical moment.
'I can see no rational reason for these decisions,' said Rex Archer, who previously led the Kansas City Health Department for 23 years.
Jackson County Public Health Director Bridgette Shaffer said public health infrastructure acts as the foundation of a healthy, resilient and thriving community. The funding losses, Shaffer said, challenge the department's ability to protect vulnerable residents and respond to emerging health threats.
While the department will seek alternative funding sources, without long-term investment, 'these reductions will have lasting consequences on the health, well-being, and economic vitality of our community,' Shaffer said in a statement.
The overall cuts to public health are sharp. The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services said it was told by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that funding streams totaling $255 million were being terminated, including $135 million in current projects to support the state's public health system.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment, which oversaw some terminated Kansas-based grants, acknowledged the Trump administration decision 'raises concerns regarding the operations and services that many Kansans rely on every day,' agency spokesperson Jill Bronaugh said in a statement.
That's putting it mildly.
One of the grant termination notices, obtained through a records request, purported to cancel funding for the Vaccines for Children program in Kansas, which provides vaccinations to uninsured and Medicaid-eligible children. KDHE administers the program in Kansas but the federal government funds it. The termination notice says the end of the pandemic provided cause to terminate the funding.
Congress established the program in the early 1990s in response to a measles epidemic. Roughly half of U.S. children qualify.
When The Star asked about the status of the program, KDHE said the cancellation was made in error and HHS corrected it the following day, with funding remaining in place. 'The core functions of KDHE's Vaccines for Children Program will continue unaffected,' Bronaugh wrote in an email.
But the cancellations so far have prompted worries about vaccine-related funding in the future, even for programs that escaped unscathed this time.
'The thing that strikes the most fear in our hearts as pediatricians is that the funding for the Vaccines for Children program will go away at some point,' said Amy Voelker, an Olathe pediatrician who said the program helps vaccinate patients in her office and other practices in the area. 'It was spared this time, but we all feel like that might be the end goal.'
Those focused on immunization efforts in the Kansas City area say the March 24 cuts are already bad enough. This past summer, the Mid-America Regional Council warned that Kansas and Missouri childhood vaccination rates lagged behind national averages.
About 90% of Jackson County kindergarteners for the 2023-2024 school year were immunized against measles, according to the latest data available from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. Platte and Clay counties were both higher.
On the Kansas side, 95% of Johnson County kindergarteners were vaccinated against measles. But just 75% were vaccinated in Wyandotte County – a steep decline from the previous school year's rate of 86%.
Measles is an extremely contagious airborne disease. A single child can easily infect a dozen or more people. Because of how easily it spreads, medical experts say measles requires an extremely high vaccination rate of 95% or more to maintain herd immunity.
Jennifer Mellick, a Johnson County-based pediatrician who sits on the board of the Kansas Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in some ways the United States' vaccination programs have been a victim of their own success. Many people have never seen a case of measles, for instance.
'We as a society have forgotten how horrible these things are,' Mellick said.
The drop in the measles vaccination rate among kindergarteners in Wyandotte County is exactly the kind of trend Nurture KC wants to combat.
Russell, the organization's executive director, said parents approach vaccines more skeptically since the pandemic. Research on vaccine uptake funded by a now-cancelled grant would have helped guide its future education and communication efforts surrounding the importance of vaccination.
'It really is the canary in the coal mine because we keep seeing those compliance rates drop every year,' Russell said of measles vaccination rates.
Nurture KC has its headquarters near Hyde Park in Kansas City but does work on both sides of the state line. The organization serves pregnant women and babies in the urban core, both in Kansas City and Wyandotte County.
Any pregnant woman may enter its program if she lives in one of a dozen zip codes locally with the highest rates of infant mortality. There's no income requirement, though Russell said participants are mostly 'some of the most underserved and vulnerable in the city.' Some 700 people participate every year.
The nonprofit offers 'wrap-around services' to pregnant women and new moms – everything from education and car seats to cribs and diapers. Immunizations represent a key component.
Nurture KC doesn't itself administer vaccines, but has previously partnered with pharmacies to hold vaccine clinics. Most recently, it was providing free COVID-19 shots for uninsured individuals because the federal government stopped covering the cost.
'We were also working on just kind of a toolkit for pregnant women and the vaccines that they need, as we know it's so important they're passing on that immunity to their babies,' Russell said.
Russell learned at the end of the day on March 25 that HHS was canceling Nurture KC's grant funding. The purpose of the grant was to address COVID-19 health disparities among high-risk and underserved populations.
Of the grant's $250,000 value, 'a substantial majority' will be clawed back, she said. Nurture KC would have spent most of the money over the next three months, as the grant was set to expire at the end of June.
The cancellation itself didn't really take her by surprise because of 'everything that we had seen happening,' Russell said. But the decision to terminate funding for projects already in progress was a bit shocking, she said.
'That's incredibly problematic,' Russell said. 'You have to be able to depend on these contracts, that there will be good faith behind it, to be able to follow through. So it leaves all of us in limbo a bit who are trying to serve as social safety net.'
The Kansas Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics' grant would have also ended on June 30. The termination means the group, which serves about 400 pediatricians, will lose about $270,000
The funding supported a six-month quality improvement project involving 17 pediatricians who are analyzing vaccination rates and ways to improve them. The Kansas chapter has done similar projects in the past with success, said executive director Denise Cyzman.
The Kansas chapter was mid-project when HHS cancelled the funding, but Cyzman said the organization would fulfill its financial obligations to the pediatricians. Other grant-supported projects weren't so lucky.
The Kansas chapter had been planning to hold a six-session wellness retreat, with pediatricians participating through web-based calls. An experienced wellness coach would have led the effort, according to information provided by the organization.
Webinars had also been planned focusing on key issues related to immunizations, including a session focused on measles. And the Kansas chapter was in the early stages of working with other groups to plan a social and traditional media campaign this summer, targeting areas of Kansas with high percentages of unvaccinated children.
'With measles being in Kansas, I don't have to tell you that sort of elevates the crisis,' Cyzman said.
Amid falling measles vaccination rates, the kindling is 'absolutely' present for a major outbreak in the Kansas City area, said Archer, the former Kansas City Health Department director. But beyond the measles, the cuts put decades of public health work at risk.
'We have worked so hard over the last 20 years to understand and to improve the protections of people in this country from all of these health challenges,' Archer said. 'And to have it decimated practically overnight, the repercussions of this are just huge.'
Russell said the uncertainty over funding 'keeps us all on edge.'
'We know that these populations need to be served,' Russell said. 'And without government investment, it makes it very difficult to do that on the scale that it needs to happen.'