FILE - This photo combination shows, from left, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, Jan. 31, 2024, in Salem, Ore., Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, Jan. 27, 2025, in Seattle and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Aug. 21, 2025, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, Lindsey Wasson, Godofredo A. Vásquez)
FILE - Seattle Kraken fan Jami Lopez, right, of Bellevue, Wash., receives a Moderna coronavirus booster vaccine from health care worker Zach Hren at the arena before the Kraken’s NHL hockey game against the St. Louis Blues, Jan. 21, 2022, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, file)
FILE - In this May 2, 2021, file photo, Austin Kennedy, left, a Seattle Sounders season ticket holder, gets the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic in a concourse at Lumen Field in Seattle, prior to an MLS soccer match between the Sounders and the Los Angeles Galaxy. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)
FILE - A COVID vaccine, left, is readied as a flu vaccine sits nearby at the L.A. Care and Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plans’ Community Resource Center where they were offering members and the public free flu and COVID-19 vaccines, Oct. 28, 2022, in Lynwood, Calif. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, file)
Governors of Washington, Oregon and California form a health alliance
SEATTLE (AP) — The Democratic governors of Washington, Oregon and California announced Wednesday that they created an alliance to safeguard health policies, believing the Trump administration is putting Americans’ health and safety at risk by politicizing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
FILE - This photo combination shows, from left, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, Jan. 31, 2024, in Salem, Ore., Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, Jan. 27, 2025, in Seattle and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Aug. 21, 2025, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, Lindsey Wasson, Godofredo A. Vásquez)
SEATTLE (AP) — The Democratic governors of Washington, Oregon and California announced Wednesday that they created an alliance to safeguard health policies, believing the Trump administration is putting Americans’ health and safety at risk by politicizing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The move comes with COVID-19 cases rising and as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the CDC and attempted to advance that are contradicted by decades of scientific research. Concerns about staffing and budget cuts were heightened after the White House sought to the agency’s director and some top CDC leaders resigned in protest.
“The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences,” the governors said in a joint statement.
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“The dismantling of public health and dismissal of experienced and respected health leaders and advisors, along with the lack of using science, data, and evidence to improve our nation’s health are placing lives at risk,” California State Health Officer Erica Pan said in the news release.
Washington state Health Secretary Dennis Worsham said public health is about prevention — “preventing illness, preventing the spread of disease, and preventing early, avoidable deaths.”
The partnership plans to coordinate health guidelines by aligning immunization plans based on recommendations from respected national medical organizations, said a joint statement from Gov. Bob Ferguson of Washington, Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
This isn’t the first time Democratic-led states have banded together to coordinate policies related to public health.
In the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, states formed regional alliances for respirators, gloves and other personal protective equipment for front-line workers and to their largely shuttered economies.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew G. Nixon shot back in a statement Wednesday that “Democrat-run states that pushed unscientific school lockdowns, toddler mask mandates, and draconian vaccine passports during the COVID era completely eroded the American people’s trust in public health agencies.”
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He said the administration’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “remains the scientific body guiding immunization recommendations in this country, and HHS will ensure policy is based on rigorous evidence and Gold Standard Science, not the failed politics of the pandemic.”
Governors in the Northeast and West Coast — all but one of them Democrats — announced separate regional groups in 2020 hours after Trump said on social media that it would be his decision when to “open up the states.”
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Associated Press reporter Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
