The abrupt termination of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grants last week will diminish access to vaccines and COVID-19 test kits at La Plata County Public Health. The cuts also strain the department’s financial ability to respond to infectious disease outbreaks.
County public health officials received a stop-work order from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the state agency that administers the federal funds to local health agencies, on March 27.
LPCPH was informed that it could no longer draw funding from two grants: an Immunization and Vaccines for Children grant with about $300,000 remaining, and an Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity grant that provided over $50,000 to the department annually.
Although the grant cancellations will not prompt layoffs at the department ‒ at least for now ‒ LPCPH Director Tracy Anselmo said, “this, overall, has bigger implications for the management of endemic diseases that we deal with every year.”
The county still has valid contracts with the state, but the state’s contracts with the federal government were terminated last week.
Tiffani Roberts, the department’s health access manager who oversaw the Immunization and Vaccines for Children grant, said the cuts would not impact LPCPH’s ability to provide COVID-19 vaccines regardless of a patient’s insurance status.
But the number of access points to those resources – events like vaccination clinics held at nontraditional locations and more accessible hours for working families – is going to shrink now that this force multiplier has been eliminated. That impacts not just vaccination efforts, Roberts said. Families who interacted with the department at those events were also often able to access other public health resources, such as free healthy foods, breastfeeding support, and nutrition education through the Women, Infants and Children program.
“It was a door to get people access to the health care system,” Roberts said.
Her grant was scheduled to expire on June 30.
Environmental Health and Communicable Disease Manager Brian Devine said the loss of the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity grant will have a more tangible impact on county residents.
The department has provided free COVID-19 and influenza tests in its lobby for several years. But it has only about 200 tests left, and Devine said they are unlikely to be replenished unless another funding source is identified.
The state, to cope with its own budgetary woes, recently returned jurisdiction to counties for responding to COVID-19 outbreaks in long-term care facilities. Devine said the department will continue to investigate infectious disease outbreaks as required, but its funding shortfall for that work is now increasing.
“We will have to continue that work without a dedicated COVID funding source, and we will be folding that into our general communicable disease investigation and outbreak management funds,” he said. “Unfortunately, there’s no surplus to spend in those funds either. In fact, those funds do not cover the full scope of work that we're required to do.”
The move comes as U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attempts to cut spending in his department through grant cancellations and a wave of firings. Nationally, HHS is trying to claw back over $11 billion in grant funding. Colorado stands to lose over $229 million, according to Attorney General Phil Weiser, who joined 22 other states and the District of Columbia in a lawsuit to try to block the cuts.
“This action of Secretary Kennedy to defund committed grants for public health and behavioral health purposes is inexplicable, illegal, and will cause untold damage to Colorado,” Weiser said in a news release.
In a statement to NBC defending the move, an HHS spokesman said, “The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”
Anselmo pushed back against that notion during a briefing to La Plata County commissioners on Wednesday.
“These are COVID recovery funds, not COVID emergency response funds,” she said, noting that the programs they supported were part of “a foundational public health service.”
As Kennedy moves to dramatically shrink the HHS workforce, Anselmo warned that La Plata County may continue to suffer – but, she told commissioners, “we just don’t have a crystal ball.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
