According to health experts, childhood vaccination rates have fallen across the country. The percentage of kindergarteners in the U.S. who have received the recommended set of vaccinations decreased slightly in the 2021–2022 school year.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 93% of students who started kindergarten were up-to-date on their childhood vaccinations. That is down less than the preceding school year when 94% of students had been administered the necessary shots designed to protect them from diseases including measles, tetanus, polio, and chickenpox.
Although the dip is minuscule, it’s still concerning for health officials. n. A 1% dip suggests that as many as 250,000 kindergarteners could be unprotected from various diseases.
The CDC study was released a few weeks after a KFF survey found that 28% of Americans opposed kindergarten vaccination requirements, almost double the 16% in 2019.
Dr. Sean O’Leary, a renowned pediatrician, described the downward trend of childhood vaccinations as ‘alarming’. It’s likely that many didn’t get their regular vaccinations because they skipped their doctors’ appointments during the Covid outbreak, he said. However, a major concern is also the rise of anti-vaccine sentiment due to widespread misinformation.
“We’re still trying to understand the extent to which misinformation around Covid vaccines has spread to misinformation about other childhood vaccines,” he stated.
The drop in childhood vaccination coverage can be partially attributed to falling immunization rates for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), which are all administered together in a single vaccine. Dr. Georgina Peackock, who heads the CDC’s Immunization Services Division, said that immunization rates against these three diseases are at their lowest point among kindergartners in more than ten years.
An outbreak of measles that began in Ohio in November has continued to spread, primarily among children under the age of 10 who have not been vaccinated in their childhood vaccination.
Nearly 70% are children younger than five, and at least 78% of the 83 kids had never been administered an MMR vaccine.
Likewise, children’s vaccination rates against Covid are low as well. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that just 11% of children between the ages of 6 months and 4 years old had been given at least one dose of the Covid vaccine. One-third of children between the ages of 5 and 11 have received both doses of the vaccine.
The CDC also released a report showing that during the pandemic, vaccination rates for some shots declined by 4–5 percentage points for babies living in low-income households or in rural regions. It was also found that compared to their white counterparts, Black and Hispanic kids at two years of age had a greater chance of being either undervaccinated or not vaccinated at all. Furthermore, the percentage of unvaccinated children was eight times greater for those without health insurance compared to those with private coverage.
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