This COVID vaccination program offered a ‘bridge’ to uninsured adults, then funding collapsed

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the Bridge Access Program to connect U.S. adults with little or no health insurance to COVID vaccines. But funding cuts mean that will end next August. File photo by Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Uninsured adults will lose the opportunity to get a free COVID vaccine in August, weeks before an updated vaccine is released ahead of the respiratory virus season.

Launched in 2023 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bridge Access Program began as a way to connect American adults with little or no health insurance to COVID vaccines. It was launched just as those vaccines were moving from federal administrators to commercial markets, complicating access for many people who previously enjoyed more freedom over where they received their dose.

Rather than anyone being able to get vaccinated for free anywhere they can get an appointment, people with health coverage can get COVID vaccines at sites approved by their insurance plans — or pay out of pocket .

Raynard Washington, health director of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, said the rollout of COVID vaccines earlier in the pandemic demonstrated a “wonderful example of health equity” because “it was not not a question of cost.”

But the end of federally covered access to COVID vaccines last fall suddenly made doses out of reach for millions of people without insurance or adequate coverage. In 2022, an estimated 26 million Americans – or about 8% of the U.S. population – had no health insurance, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

In and around Charlotte, North Carolina, more than one in 10 residents lack health insurance, Washington said. He saw how the Bridge program helped uninsured people receive vaccines that protected them from the risk of developing serious COVID infections after the pandemic public health emergency ended.

North Carolina’s Medicaid expansion last December also helped connect people to the health care coverage they needed, but “a number of adults will still be left behind,” Washington added.

LEARN MORE: How Uninsured Adults Can Still Get the COVID Vaccine

Since September, more than 1.4 million COVID vaccine doses have been administered across the country through the Bridge Access program, including to more than 812,000 people without insurance, according to an email between a spokesperson for the CDC and a CBS News reporter. It draws inspiration from the successful Vaccines for Children program, launched in 1994 in response to a measles outbreak and which helped prevent about 30 million hospitalizations and hundreds of millions of illnesses, according to CDC estimates.

But in March, congressional negotiations over the national budget resulted in the cancellation of $4.3 billion from the Department of Health and Human Services in COVID supplemental funding. The move prematurely ended the Bridge program, which was already set to expire in December and would have covered vaccines for an additional season against respiratory viruses this fall. The program will now run out of funding in August.

State and local public health departments are looking for ways to intervene, but these are the same institutions that were chronically underfunded for years before the pandemic. Now that COVID-related funds have dried up, these same ministries have even fewer resources to draw on.

Without the Bridge Access Program, Washington said, “We do not have sufficient resources locally to purchase vaccines for everyone who is uninsured.”

“This speaks to the importance of moving toward universal vaccines,” he said.

Federally qualified health centers might also be able to step in, and a pool of federal dollars called infrastructure funds in the Section 317 vaccination program could help narrow the gap, Chrissie Juliano said , executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition. These funds are designed to improve access, safety, and effectiveness of vaccines and can cover awareness and related programs, but they cannot fix everything.

“We need to think creatively and bring vaccines or other preventative services to the people who need them most,” Juliano said.