Vaccines for Children Program

A United States federal program, established in 1994 and administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that provides recommended vaccines at no cost to children who are uninsured, enrolled in Medicaid, American Indian or Alaska Native, or underinsured and vaccinated at a Federally Qualified Health Center or Rural Health Clinic. It was created after a measles resurgence in the United States from 1989 to 1991, which caused tens of thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths, exposed how cost barriers were leaving many low-income children under-vaccinated even where vaccines were nominally recommended. The program now supplies roughly half of the vaccine doses administered to children in the United States.