Protecting Public Health: GSA Joins Organizations to Safeguard Vaccine Infrastructure

GSA has a longstanding commitment to advocating for age-appropriate immunizations across the life-course through our National Adult Vaccination Program and Concentric Value of Vaccinations campaign. Science is clear: vaccinations prevent disease and save lives. It’s time for a return to reverence for these medical innovations which, regrettably, are being undermined by the current administration. As we live in a world that sometimes forgets what is at stake without them, GSA is advancing work on several initiatives supporting the value of vaccines.  Recent activity includes:

1. GSA has just completed the third in a series of six webinars with the theme of “The Concentric Value of Vaccination.” In this latest installment, “The Role of Resilience,” former GSA President Barbara Resnick explores the importance of resilience as we age, its relationship to adult vaccines and community immunity, and ways we can implement a resilience framework in our professional and personal lives. 
2. GSA has joined the Summit Adult Vaccine Recommendations Review (SAVRR) Council as a voting member. The council provides implementation guidance on U.S.-based recommendations for all adult vaccines and for influenza vaccines across the lifespan. We’ve tapped GSA member Ben Seligman of UCLA to represent us on the council, which meets monthly.
3. GSA continues to play a leading role on the Adult Vaccine Access Coalition (AVAC), with GSA’s Vice President of Policy and Professional Affairs Trish D’Antonio serving as co-chair. AVAC advocates for federal policies that improve access to and increase utilization of vaccines among adults. In this role, Trish has recently participated in more than 20 visits to House and Senate offices to advocate for adult vaccinations and represented GSA at an AVAC-hosted educational briefing on Capitol Hill.
4. GSA has signed on to eight regulatory comment letters in support of vaccine access for all of us as we age.
5. GSA is aligned with and closely monitoring the work of the Vaccine Integrity Project, whose goal is to produce policy and process options that leaders of future U.S. health departments and agencies can evaluate and adopt. This work has become extremely important over the past 18 months as the federal vaccine policy landscape has undergone significant change. This Vaccine Integrity Project initiative focuses on the federal vaccine evaluation and recommendation process, zeroing in on the role historically played by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.