Officials in Louisiana held a series of meetings in October and November, telling Department of Health staff that the state would no longer allow them to promote COVID, flu, and mpox vaccinations.

The new policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing, four health department employees told NPR. They asked to remain anonymous.

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The directive was shared by two lower-level officials in the department after the state’s surgeon general was unable to attend, the staff members said.

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Employees were told they could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccination events, give presentations, or create social media posts encouraging the public to get vaccines. They were also barred from putting up signs at the department’s clinics announcing COVID, flu, or mpox vaccines were available on site.

“I mean, do they want to dismantle public health?” one health department staffer asked.

In 2023, 652 people in Louisiana died of COVID, including five children, and the state is tied with Washington, D.C., for the highest rate of flu in the U.S. Flu killed 586 people in Louisiana in 2022, according to data from the state’s health department.

As of August 6, 2024, the U.S. reported 60 deaths and 33,435 cases of mpox. 309 cases were reported in Louisiana through February 2023, the last data available before the state stopped reporting cases.

“I’m very surprised that anyone would call a state meeting, not provide an agenda for that meeting, not provide a written set of notes from that meeting,” said Kimberly Hood, who led the Office of Public Health, a subunit of the health department, from 2021 to 2022. “I think that, to me, it sounds like people are trying to avoid public records laws.”

The policy change can be traced back to Gov. Jeff Landry (R), an anti-vaxxer who served as the state’s attorney general during the COVID pandemic, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Landry ally and Donald Trump’s pick to head up the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In his role as AG, Landry spoke at a state committee hearing in 2021 about his opposition to adding the COVID vaccines to the childhood immunization schedule. Kennedy testified alongside him, presenting false claims about COVID vaccines.

As governor, Landry has signed five bills and two resolutions this year rolling back vaccine requirements, limiting the power of public health authorities, and questioning vaccine safety.

Landry appointed Dr. Ralph Abraham, a family medicine doctor and another vaccine skeptic, to be the state’s surgeon general.

“I see, now, vaccine injury every day of my practice,” Abraham said at a 2024 legislative meeting on the state’s response to the COVID pandemic, linking vaccination with autism.

The adverse effects of the COVID vaccine have been “suppressed,” he told legislators.

In a statement, the Louisiana Department of Health told NPR it has been “reevaluating both the state’s public health priorities as well as our messaging around vaccine promotion, especially for COVID-19 and influenza.”

The department described the move as a shift “away from one-size-fits-all paternalistic guidance” to one in which “immunization for any vaccine, along with practices like mask wearing and social distancing, are an individual’s personal choice.”

The statement did not address mpox vaccinations.

The Health Department’s new unwritten guidance against vaccine promotion is “malpractice,” said Dr. George Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

The U.S. vaccination program represents “one of the most important public health interventions that we have,” Benjamin said.

“Anyone who’s articulating that these vaccines are not well tested, they’re not safe, they’re not effective, is not giving you the science as we know it today,” he added.

Former health staffer Hood said the false claims are “a step backwards.”

“It’s a medical marvel that we’re fortunate enough to live in a time where these vaccines are available to us,” she said, “and to not make use of that tool is unconscionable.”

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