Today is the last day for public comment to the CDC ACIP vaccine committee. We need everyone to send a strong message to the CDC and RFK Jr. that we must have broad access to vaccines and science-based expert advisors. While there are many great comments in support of vaccines, the comments have recently been flooded by antivaxxers. Written comment submission and oral comment registration closes TODAY, June 20 at 11:59 EDT. We need both written comments and oral comments, whether you are an expert or a concerned member of the public. You can participate either way, or do both.

View the docket here: https://www.regulations.gov/document/CDC-2025-0024-0001

Register to make an oral comment at the 6/25-6/26 meeting (via online teleconferencing) by filling out the oral comment form: https://www2.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/acip_publiccomment.asp All fields are required. If you are not affiliated with an organization, you can write “Self” or “Not Affiliated” in the organization field. Be sure to choose 6/25 or 6/26 as the date—the meeting was shortened to two days, but 6/27 was not removed from the registration form. If you are selected for oral comment, you should receive an email by June 23, which usually requires a response to confirm your spot. Oral comments are typically 3 minutes long, and most people find it helpful to read from a written statement.

See the CDC’s ACIP meeting page for additional details for the June 25-27 meeting: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/meetings/index.html

A draft meeting agenda was posted on June 18 and shows that votes are only scheduled for RSV and influenza vaccines. Although COVID vaccines will be discussed, no vote appears on the draft agenda. I expect the meeting discussion to go fully antivaxx, with discussion of settled science including MMRV vaccines and thimerosal in influenza vaccines appearing on the agenda. Although MMRV is not up for voting in this agenda, this meeting’s discussion could be a prelude to future top-down policy changes from RFK Jr. and others, or future votes within this committee.

Thank you to everyone who has commented already, and please take a moment to share this information with anyone who may be able to submit a comment today.

Talking Points

Below are some key talking points for your comment, and a sample comment is below the divider. Please feel free to copy, modify, and share any of the text for your own advocacy.

1. CDC ACIP expert advisors must support widespread and unhindered access to a wide range of safe and effective vaccines, including COVID, HPV, influenza, MMR/MMRV, meningococcal, and RSV vaccines.

2. Currently available FDA-approved vaccines are safe and effective. Children, adults, and pregnant people all rely on CDC ACIP vaccine recommendations for access to vaccines and insurance coverage.

3. We need a universal recommendation for COVID vaccination for people of all ages, including children and pregnant people, at least annually.

You should also include comments about why vaccination matters to you personally. You might include how vaccination for a broad range of infectious diseases has positively impacted you and your community or how barriers to vaccination or insurance coverage have impacted you or a loved one.

Optionally, at the beginning of your comment, you may also include whether or not you have any financial conflicts of interest relevant to the topic.

Submit Your Comment

Sample Comment

Docket: CDC-2025-0024

June 20, 2025

Public Comment for the June 25-27, 2025 CDC ACIP Committee Meeting

To the CDC ACIP committee:

I have no conflicts of interest to disclose. I am writing to express my grave concerns about the recent termination of all 17 existing CDC ACIP committee members, announced on June 9 by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Independent expert scientific and medical input from the ACIP committee is crucial to inform access to safe and effective FDA-approved and authorized vaccines and also to guide insurance coverage and coverage for uninsured children through the Vaccines for Children program. Vaccination rates for many diseases are far too low, and our communities are impacted by outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, pertussis, and COVID. Many of these infections cause serious and potentially lifelong consequences in unvaccinated children and adults. Children should not die because of a lack of access to affordable vaccines. We need strong support for effective vaccination campaigns, including COVID, HPV, influenza, MMR/MMRV, meningococcal, and RSV vaccines.

The recent restrictions on COVID vaccinations are a serious concern. All of us must have regular access to updated COVID vaccines, which must be made available widely and must be covered by health insurance. The scientific evidence is clear: COVID vaccination within the last year reduces the risk of symptoms, severe disease, disability, and death for people of all ages, including previously healthy people. The new policies impose harmful restrictions on COVID vaccines, which limit vaccine access for children, pregnant people, and adults under age 65. These restrictions also sow uncertainty and doubt about COVID vaccines, while there is no scientific basis for the restrictions. Please take action to reinstate universal COVID vaccine recommendations for people of all ages, at least once a year, for all COVID vaccine formulations.

Vaccine policy changes must be undertaken in a science-based, open, and transparent process that prioritizes public health. The COVID vaccine policy updates were done in a top-down fashion, without appropriate expert advisory committee input. FDA’s VRBPAC committee members were not allowed to discuss the COVID vaccine policy changes at the May 22 meeting. There was no opportunity to provide public comment on the new policies before they were implemented. Influenza vaccine strain selection also occurred in a closed-door meeting without input from the FDA VRBPAC committee and with no opportunity for public comment. Please ensure that all vaccine policy decisions are made using appropriate open and transparent processes, which are essential to our democracy.

From the National Park Service—if you want to save a copy, grab it soon. The current administration is taking apart the NPS.

“Determined to Make His Way to Mexico”: Freedom Seekers in the Antebellum Texas–Mexico Borderlands

Each June Black communities across the United States celebrate Juneteenth, a day that commemorates African American freedom. The conclusion of the U.S. Civil War in April 1865 freed almost all enslaved people in the U.S. South, but Black men, women, and children in Texas remained in bondage until Union soldiers freed them in June 1865. However, not all enslaved Black people in Texas waited for the Union Army to liberate them. Some escaped south to Mexico in search of freedom decades before the Civil War began.

In September 1858 twenty-two-year-old Sandy escaped from Big Cypress Creek, Texas, which was eighteen miles north of Houston. This instance was not the first time that he had run away. The last time he had fled, someone captured him approximately 180 miles southwest of Big Cypress Creek.^[1] Undeterred by this failed escape, Sandy was “determined to make his way to Mexico.”^[2] Despite wearing an “iron collar around his neck and shackles on his feet,” Sandy ran away again hoping to find freedom.^[3] There were limited opportunities for fugitives from slavery to receive aid during their escapes through Texas. If Sandy ventured near an enslaved community, he could obtain food from its members. If he arrived to Hidalgo County, Texas, he could seek refuge at Nathaniel Jackson’s ranch or use John Webber’s ferry to cross the Rio Grande.^[4] While it is unknown if Sandy ever reached freedom in Mexico, his efforts show that enslaved Texans viewed the nation as a safe haven.

By the early 1850s most enslaved people in Texas knew that Mexico was their best option for freedom. In a 1937 Works Progress Administration interview, then ninety-two-year-old Felix Haywood recalled, “Sometimes someone would come ‘long and try to get us to run up North and be free. We used to laugh at that. There wasn’t no reason to run up North. All we had to do was to walk, but walk South. And we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande.”^[5] Haywood and others in his enslaved Texas community likely learned about freedom in Mexico from local Mexicans in Texas, or Tejanos. Because of this spread of information, enslaved people in Texas knew that the northern United States and Canada were not feasible places for freedom not only because of the significant distance, but also because Mexico had abolished slavery decades earlier. In 1829 Mexican President Vicente Guerrero abolished slavery, but he exempted Texas from abolition to placate Anglo enslavers. In 1837 Mexico abolished slavery again without any exceptions.^[6] Men and women in bondage who thought about escape used their knowledge of abolition in Mexico and a limited understanding of their local areas to seek freedom in a northeastern Mexican state.^[7]

Unlike enslaved Black people who escaped to the northern United States and Canada, there were few communities of antislavery activists to assist self-liberated Black people who arrived in Mexico. After crossing the Rio Grande, freedom seekers typically sought refuge in the nearest border town. Coahuila border town Piedras Negras was an important site of freedom in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands because fugitives from slavery frequently escaped there in the early 1850s; a nearby settlement of Mascogos (Black Seminoles from the United States) helped reinforce the idea of Coahuila as a space of refuge.^[8] Still, self-emancipated Black people residing in Mexican border towns had to remain vigilant to maintain their freedom. Alarmed by the flight of enslaved people to Mexico, Anglo Texas enslavers employed Texas Rangers––Texas’s police force founded in 1835––to track, capture, and extradite freedom seekers who had reached Mexico. While the U.S. government could not enforce the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) outside of U.S. borders, Rangers and others employed to kidnap fugitives from slavery used violence to capture freedom seekers in Mexico and return them to Texas.

Enslaved people in Texas imagined their journeys to freedom differently than those in bondage in the Upper and Lower U.S. South. Drawing from information they gathered from local Mexicans and their own failed escape attempts, enslaved Texans crafted routes that guided them south to Mexico. Their experiences cast a new light on enslavement and resistance in antebellum Texas. While Juneteenth celebrates Black freedom gained shortly after the U.S. Civil War, there were many freedom seekers from Texas who self-emancipated to Mexico before 1865.

Article contributed by Mekala Audain – Associate Professor of History at The College of New Jersey.

Further Reading

Audain, Mekala. “Design His Course to Mexico: The Fugitive Slave Experience in the Texas–Mexico Borderlands, 1850–1853.” In Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America, 1775–1860, edited by Damian Alan Pargas, 232–250. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018.

Baumgartner, Alice L. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 2020.

Cornell, Sarah E. “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and African Americans in Mexico, 1833–1857.” Journal of American History 100. 2 (2013): 351–374.

Kelley, Sean. “‘Mexico in His Head’: Slavery and the Texas–Mexico Border, 1810–1860.” Journal of Social History 37. 3 (2004): 709–723.

Mareite, Thomas. “Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the US South to Mexico’s Northeast, 1803–1861.” PhD diss. Leiden University, 2020.Nichols, James David. The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.–Mexico Border. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

Footnotes

[1] “Runaway,” The Weekly Telegraph (Houston, TX), October 20, 1858, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
[2]“Runaway.”
[3] “Runaway.”
[4] Roseann Bacha-Garza, “Race and Ethnicity along the Antebellum Rio Grande: Emancipated Slaves and Mixed Race Colonies,” in The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846–1876, eds. Roseann Bacha-Garza, Christopher L. Miller, and Russell K. Skowronek (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019), 94–95.
[5] George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave – Texas Narratives, Vol. 4, Part 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 132. Emphasis in the original.
[6] Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1989), 25–26; Manuel Dublán y José Maria Lozano, Legislación Mexicana, o, colección complete de las disposiciones legislativas expedidas desde la independencia de la republica, tomo III (Mexico: Dublán y Lozano, 1876), 352.
[7] Campbell, An Empire for Slavery, 56.
[8] Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey Through Texas; or a Saddle-trip on the Southwestern Frontier: With a Statistical Appendix (New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1857), 324. For more about Mascogos in Coahuila, see Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993).

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You think they would have looked at the policy more closely before cheering their fearless leader for restoring the names of military bases named in honor of Confederate generals. Instead, the Confederate heritage community has, once again, been made to look like fools.

When will they learn that Donald Trump has no interest in honoring their Confederate ancestors unless it benefits his political or business interests. He is and will always remain an opportunist. His views on the display of the Confederate battle flag have been all over the place since 2015 and he even placed a historical marker on his Virginia golf course commemorating a fake Civil War battle.

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Back in February, organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Virginia Flaggers criticized President Trump for restoring the name Fort Bragg, because it honored a completely different person, who just happened to share the last name of Confederate general Braxton Bragg.

What Trump announced yesterday is just a continuation of this policy, but it looks like the Virginia Flaggers and their followers haven’t caught on yet. Here are just a few of the roughly 1,100 comments that have been posted on their Facebook page.

Thank you President Trump for bringing back our Great Southern Heroes names-!!!

Thank you President Trump . You’re a true American and the Greatest President we have ever had.

Becouse presudent trump is onnly brave Men spouk true America god bles president.

I love this man.!!! He JUST needs folks to be on his side… He can fix it all.! I believe this in my heart.! Deo Vindice.

Not everyone has been deceived, including none other than Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

Who is the genius, who figured out how to restore the name of Fort A.P. Hill without violating the law banning the naming of military bases after Confederate generals?

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I am going to be laughing about this all day today.

As I pointed out back in February, the restoration of these military base names has absolutely nothing to do with honoring the Confederacy or Confederate military leaders. The Virginia Flaggers and other Confederate heritage groups should no better than to place their trust in a corrupt Northern businessman.

Isn’t this exactly the profile of the ‘evil and corrupt Yankee’ that we are told their ancestors were fighting against during the Civil War? LOL

Of course, what is striking is the hypocrisy behind their outrage over the renaming of these military bases. It should come as no surprise that no one in this community is speaking out against the proposal to rename naval vessels that honor some of this nation’s most important freedom fighters.

Mr. [Harvey] Milk is one of several trailblazers whose name has been identified for possible removal from naval vessels. According to a senior official familiar with a memo from John Phelan, the secretary of the Navy, they include Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, another Supreme Court justice, who became a feminist icon; Harriet Tubman, who, after being born into slavery, became an abolitionist instrumental in the Underground Railroad; Lucy Stone, a prominent abolitionist and suffragist; Medgar Evers, a civil-rights leader who was assassinated by a member of the Ku Klux Klan; Cesar Chavez, a labor leader; and Dolores Huerta, another labor leader.

Somehow this does not rise to the level of ‘erasing history.’

Harvey Milk served nearly four years in the Navy. He was discharged at the rank of a junior lieutenant after being threatened with a court martial because of his sexual orientation.

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In 1943, Medgar Evers dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army Reserve Corps during World War II. He unloaded weapons, vehicles, and supplies from transport ships. After D-Day, Evers and his 325th Port Company went into France, where he served in the all-Black 3677th Quartermaster Company and 958th Quartermaster Service Company. He was part of the Red Ball Express, a truck convoy system primarily composed of African American Soldiers that supplied Allied forces.

I guess the only honor and history that is worth defending is of those people who chose to make war against the United States rather than those who have defended it or stood up for its principle of equality.

For now, I am going to relish the fact that these people got exactly what they deserved.