U.S. vaccination rates are plunging. Look up where your school stands.
Rocked by pandemic politics, the nation’s shield against infectious disease is shrinking.
By Lauren Weber, Caitlin Gilbert, Dylan Moriarty and Joshua Lott
Washington Post reports:
Before the pandemic, roughly half of counties had kindergarten vaccination rates high enough to prevent measles outbreaks.
After the pandemic, many counties increased their vaccination rates, reaching the recommended level of protection.
But far more lost ground, leaving only about a quarter of the counties with herd immunity in kindergartners.
BECKER, MINNESOTA —
“Vaccination rates among kindergarten students have plunged across broad swaths of the United States since before the pandemic, exposing children and families to increasing health risks as many school districts pull back from their traditional role as a bulwark against infectious disease, according to a Washington Post investigation.
The accelerating decline reveals the lasting medical consequences of a political backlash against public health efforts during the pandemic, which radicalized many against long-standing vaccine mandates.
The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles — the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as “herd immunity” — has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent, according to The Post’s examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia.
Most of the counties that previously lacked herd immunity for kindergarten classrooms got worse, according to the Post analysis, which in most cases compared the academic years 2018-2019 and 2024-2025.
Schools, buffeted by post-pandemic politics, have become less strict in enforcing vaccination mandates, The Post found. Some school officials said their highest priority in the wake of covid lockdowns has been ensuring students return to class, not enforcing inoculation requirements or encouraging shots.
“We don’t promote medical decisions,” said Jeremy Schmidt, superintendent of the Becker Public School District in Minnesota, part of a conservative county northwest of Minneapolis. Kindergarten vaccination rates at Sherburne County’s Becker Primary School have dropped from nearly 100 percent before the pandemic to 77 percent in the 2024-2025 school year.
Roughly a third of schools in Minnesota that responded to a state Department of Health survey of school nurses two years ago reported they don’t have a policy to refuse students entry without immunization records. Some told the state they had stopped doing so after the pandemic, with one school nurse saying: “Our community has been very hesitant since COVID-19. Many have voiced that they do not trust the CDC or Public Health officials any longer.”
The Post’s findings show that at least 5.2 million kindergarten-age children in the U.S. are living in counties where vaccination rates for classrooms have fallen below the herd immunity threshold — up from about 3.5 million before the pandemic. While the vast majority of those who receive the measles vaccine are protected from severe illness and death, without herd immunity measles can still spread among those not immune, including those who cannot be vaccinated because of age or because they are immunocompromised.
Out of the 44 states reporting county-level rates, 36 and the District of Columbia also reported them for individual schools or districts. At least 19,000 schools — nearly half of schools in the Post analysis — were more vulnerable to outbreaks.
Medical specialists and public health experts expect more children will be left unprotected given policies advanced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist who is rolling back government vaccine policies and recommendations.
When asked about the declining vaccination rates, Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon emphasized Kennedy’s focus on personal choice and opposition to mandates.
The secretary “has been clear that vaccination is the most effective way to prevent measles,” Nixon said, adding that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “encourages individuals to consult with a healthcare provider on what is best for them, as the decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”
The nation currently is experiencing its highest annual measles case tally in at least 33 years, a stunning reversal. In South Carolina this month, a measles outbreak topped 175 cases, mostly among unvaccinated individuals, with hundreds quarantined. The resurgence of measles is seen by doctors and public health experts as a harbinger of the return of other deadly, vaccine-preventable illnesses, like whooping cough, which has killed three children in Kentucky in the past 12 months.
For generations, schools have required children to have proof of vaccination as a step toward protecting entire communities, starting with Massachusetts’ adoption of a school mandate for the smallpox vaccine in 1855. Following the success of the polio and measles vaccines in the mid-20th Century, schools and the American public widely supported vaccination. By the 1980-1981 school year, all 50 states had vaccination laws covering students first entering school.
A proliferation of religious and other exemptions passed by state legislatures has weakened these mandates over time. Objections to mandates of all kinds intensified after the coronavirus pandemic, with some Republican-controlled states taking action. This year, Florida’s governor and top health official announced a push to abolish school vaccine mandates altogether, as the measles vaccination rate in the state fell more than 5 percent since the pandemic.
Vaccination has become such a hot-button political issue in some states that the dynamic is similar to battles over reproductive health — and local school officials don’t want to be in the crossfire, said James Colgrove, a professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who has studied the role of schools in public health. That means more children will pick up infections in school and bring them home.
“The most dangerous deadly diseases will come back and it won’t only be kids who suffer,” he said. “It’ll be adults in the community who are immune-compromised, who are elderly. It’ll be infants.”
Public health experts argue the U.S. measles outbreaks show why easing vaccine requirements doesn’t always translate into better school attendance. As the South Carolina experience revealed this month, unvaccinated kids are missing school during quarantines, said Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general during President Donald Trump’s first term.
“That is completely inconsistent with folks who say that their biggest concerns about covid were that we didn’t care about keeping kids in school,” he said.
For this story, Post reporters collected school-level data from 36 states and county-level data from 44 states and D.C. that reflected measles or overall vaccination rates for kindergartners (measles vaccination usually involves the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella). Such information is not typically communicated to parents.
Reporters reviewed and mapped tens of thousands of individual schools’ data, assembling the most comprehensive public database. In some states, unvaccinated rates could reflect missing immunization records for students.
The Post also spoke to over 75 medical experts, parents, school nurses, vaccine and anti-vaccine advocates, and contacted every state health department in the United States.
The results showed wide variation in rates, depending on geography. While children in California, which does not allow for nonmedical vaccine exemptions, are vaccinated against measles at 96 percent, there is not a single county in Idaho, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah or Wisconsin whose kindergarten rates meet herd immunity protection level.”
Counties that Trump won in 2024 were more likely to lose ground on kindergarten vaccination rates in recent years than those won by then-Vice President Kamala Harris. But blue cities still saw dips as well. St. Louis reported just 74 percent of kindergartners vaccinated against measles. A quarter of kindergartners in the Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, which includes the city of Monroe, are unvaccinated. In Maine, Alabama and Connecticut, vaccination rates went up since the pandemic.
“We have very different levels of health and protection based on Zip codes, and children don’t get to choose where they live or where they go to school,” said Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “For pediatricians, immunization is a child health priority, not a partisan issue.”
Among states, Minnesota has experienced one of the largest drops in vaccination rates at 6.5 percent since 2018. Since the pandemic, the vaccination rate in Sherburne County, which includes Becker, has fallen by more than 12 percent, from near herd immunity in the 2018-2019 school year to 82 percent for the last school year.
Counties that Trump won in 2024 were more likely to lose ground on kindergarten vaccination rates.
‘It’s every parent’s choice’:
Becker and the surrounding area is occupied by farms and residential neighborhoods, its economy buoyed in part by an aging power plant transitioning from coal to solar energy and a firearms parts manufacturer. A billboard honors slain conservative youth activist Charlie Kirk on the way from Becker to St. Cloud.
Brady Chaffin, who has a Becker Primary School kindergartner and a 2-year-old, was among the school’s parents who said they opted against measles vaccines for their kids. Chaffin said residents like him don’t trust government health recommendations, adding that the class’s low vaccination rate carries an increased risk of an outbreak did not worry him.
“It’s every parent’s choice,” he said, waiting at the front of the school pickup line on a recent afternoon. “A lot of people distrust the system after the pandemic, especially a small town like this.”
The correlation between conservative communities and low vaccination rates reflects a national pattern. A Washington Post-KFF poll this summer found American parents who are choosing to skip or delay vaccines for their children are more likely to home-school their children, be White and very religious, identify as Republican or be under 35.
Lauren Atkinson, a Becker Primary School parent with a first-grader, Scarlett, and a second-grader, Harley, said she was surprised to learn how far kindergarten vaccine rates had fallen in her hometown. Atkinson said she was grateful both her children are vaccinated.
Lauren Atkinson said that while she is as moderate as the wind blows, her family believes in vaccines and did not skip any immunizations during the pandemic. Vaccines were not an issue when she was a kid, she said, and as far as she was aware, everyone just got the shots. Now, Atkinson said, “People want to take a stand against government, against politicians, against people in power, and exemptions for vaccines is one of the easier ways to do so.”
None of the 15 Becker Primary School parents interviewed by The Post — three of whom said they opted against immunization for their kids — said they had any idea what the vaccination rates were in their school. Some said they believed it was none of their business what other families chose to do, while others were alarmed at the low rate.
Emily Jenkins, mom to twin first grade boys at Becker Primary School, moved to the area from the outer suburbs of the Twin Cities with her family for more space to work on race cars and ride 4-wheelers and snowmobiles — and for what she called its strong public schools. Living on 2.6 acres, she has tried out raw milk for her family and dines at a local restaurant that fries meals in beef tallow — popular dietary choices among supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement championed by Kennedy. But she said her sons are vaccinated, adding that the low vaccination rates worry her, she said.
“If there was an outbreak, or if there was a sickness going around, would I know about it? Because people around here are so closed up,” she said.
My comments:
There is much, much more to this article and I would encourage every parent, grandparent, or concerned adult to track down a copy of the full article at their local public library so that they can be informed about all the awful decisions Kennedy is pushing into law/practice that are harmful to you, your family, your community, and our entire country.
By Lauren Weber, Caitlin Gilbert, Dylan Moriarty and Joshua Lott
Washington Post reports:
Before the pandemic, roughly half of counties had kindergarten vaccination rates high enough to prevent measles outbreaks.
After the pandemic, many counties increased their vaccination rates, reaching the recommended level of protection.
But far more lost ground, leaving only about a quarter of the counties with herd immunity in kindergartners.
BECKER, MINNESOTA —
“Vaccination rates among kindergarten students have plunged across broad swaths of the United States since before the pandemic, exposing children and families to increasing health risks as many school districts pull back from their traditional role as a bulwark against infectious disease, according to a Washington Post investigation.
The accelerating decline reveals the lasting medical consequences of a political backlash against public health efforts during the pandemic, which radicalized many against long-standing vaccine mandates.
The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles — the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as “herd immunity” — has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent, according to The Post’s examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia.
Most of the counties that previously lacked herd immunity for kindergarten classrooms got worse, according to the Post analysis, which in most cases compared the academic years 2018-2019 and 2024-2025.
Schools, buffeted by post-pandemic politics, have become less strict in enforcing vaccination mandates, The Post found. Some school officials said their highest priority in the wake of covid lockdowns has been ensuring students return to class, not enforcing inoculation requirements or encouraging shots.
“We don’t promote medical decisions,” said Jeremy Schmidt, superintendent of the Becker Public School District in Minnesota, part of a conservative county northwest of Minneapolis. Kindergarten vaccination rates at Sherburne County’s Becker Primary School have dropped from nearly 100 percent before the pandemic to 77 percent in the 2024-2025 school year.
Roughly a third of schools in Minnesota that responded to a state Department of Health survey of school nurses two years ago reported they don’t have a policy to refuse students entry without immunization records. Some told the state they had stopped doing so after the pandemic, with one school nurse saying: “Our community has been very hesitant since COVID-19. Many have voiced that they do not trust the CDC or Public Health officials any longer.”
The Post’s findings show that at least 5.2 million kindergarten-age children in the U.S. are living in counties where vaccination rates for classrooms have fallen below the herd immunity threshold — up from about 3.5 million before the pandemic. While the vast majority of those who receive the measles vaccine are protected from severe illness and death, without herd immunity measles can still spread among those not immune, including those who cannot be vaccinated because of age or because they are immunocompromised.
Out of the 44 states reporting county-level rates, 36 and the District of Columbia also reported them for individual schools or districts. At least 19,000 schools — nearly half of schools in the Post analysis — were more vulnerable to outbreaks.
Medical specialists and public health experts expect more children will be left unprotected given policies advanced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist who is rolling back government vaccine policies and recommendations.
When asked about the declining vaccination rates, Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon emphasized Kennedy’s focus on personal choice and opposition to mandates.
The secretary “has been clear that vaccination is the most effective way to prevent measles,” Nixon said, adding that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “encourages individuals to consult with a healthcare provider on what is best for them, as the decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”
The nation currently is experiencing its highest annual measles case tally in at least 33 years, a stunning reversal. In South Carolina this month, a measles outbreak topped 175 cases, mostly among unvaccinated individuals, with hundreds quarantined. The resurgence of measles is seen by doctors and public health experts as a harbinger of the return of other deadly, vaccine-preventable illnesses, like whooping cough, which has killed three children in Kentucky in the past 12 months.
For generations, schools have required children to have proof of vaccination as a step toward protecting entire communities, starting with Massachusetts’ adoption of a school mandate for the smallpox vaccine in 1855. Following the success of the polio and measles vaccines in the mid-20th Century, schools and the American public widely supported vaccination. By the 1980-1981 school year, all 50 states had vaccination laws covering students first entering school.
A proliferation of religious and other exemptions passed by state legislatures has weakened these mandates over time. Objections to mandates of all kinds intensified after the coronavirus pandemic, with some Republican-controlled states taking action. This year, Florida’s governor and top health official announced a push to abolish school vaccine mandates altogether, as the measles vaccination rate in the state fell more than 5 percent since the pandemic.
Vaccination has become such a hot-button political issue in some states that the dynamic is similar to battles over reproductive health — and local school officials don’t want to be in the crossfire, said James Colgrove, a professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who has studied the role of schools in public health. That means more children will pick up infections in school and bring them home.
“The most dangerous deadly diseases will come back and it won’t only be kids who suffer,” he said. “It’ll be adults in the community who are immune-compromised, who are elderly. It’ll be infants.”
Public health experts argue the U.S. measles outbreaks show why easing vaccine requirements doesn’t always translate into better school attendance. As the South Carolina experience revealed this month, unvaccinated kids are missing school during quarantines, said Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general during President Donald Trump’s first term.
“That is completely inconsistent with folks who say that their biggest concerns about covid were that we didn’t care about keeping kids in school,” he said.
For this story, Post reporters collected school-level data from 36 states and county-level data from 44 states and D.C. that reflected measles or overall vaccination rates for kindergartners (measles vaccination usually involves the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella). Such information is not typically communicated to parents.
Reporters reviewed and mapped tens of thousands of individual schools’ data, assembling the most comprehensive public database. In some states, unvaccinated rates could reflect missing immunization records for students.
The Post also spoke to over 75 medical experts, parents, school nurses, vaccine and anti-vaccine advocates, and contacted every state health department in the United States.
The results showed wide variation in rates, depending on geography. While children in California, which does not allow for nonmedical vaccine exemptions, are vaccinated against measles at 96 percent, there is not a single county in Idaho, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah or Wisconsin whose kindergarten rates meet herd immunity protection level.”
Counties that Trump won in 2024 were more likely to lose ground on kindergarten vaccination rates in recent years than those won by then-Vice President Kamala Harris. But blue cities still saw dips as well. St. Louis reported just 74 percent of kindergartners vaccinated against measles. A quarter of kindergartners in the Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, which includes the city of Monroe, are unvaccinated. In Maine, Alabama and Connecticut, vaccination rates went up since the pandemic.
“We have very different levels of health and protection based on Zip codes, and children don’t get to choose where they live or where they go to school,” said Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “For pediatricians, immunization is a child health priority, not a partisan issue.”
Among states, Minnesota has experienced one of the largest drops in vaccination rates at 6.5 percent since 2018. Since the pandemic, the vaccination rate in Sherburne County, which includes Becker, has fallen by more than 12 percent, from near herd immunity in the 2018-2019 school year to 82 percent for the last school year.
Counties that Trump won in 2024 were more likely to lose ground on kindergarten vaccination rates.
‘It’s every parent’s choice’:
Becker and the surrounding area is occupied by farms and residential neighborhoods, its economy buoyed in part by an aging power plant transitioning from coal to solar energy and a firearms parts manufacturer. A billboard honors slain conservative youth activist Charlie Kirk on the way from Becker to St. Cloud.
Brady Chaffin, who has a Becker Primary School kindergartner and a 2-year-old, was among the school’s parents who said they opted against measles vaccines for their kids. Chaffin said residents like him don’t trust government health recommendations, adding that the class’s low vaccination rate carries an increased risk of an outbreak did not worry him.
“It’s every parent’s choice,” he said, waiting at the front of the school pickup line on a recent afternoon. “A lot of people distrust the system after the pandemic, especially a small town like this.”
The correlation between conservative communities and low vaccination rates reflects a national pattern. A Washington Post-KFF poll this summer found American parents who are choosing to skip or delay vaccines for their children are more likely to home-school their children, be White and very religious, identify as Republican or be under 35.
Lauren Atkinson, a Becker Primary School parent with a first-grader, Scarlett, and a second-grader, Harley, said she was surprised to learn how far kindergarten vaccine rates had fallen in her hometown. Atkinson said she was grateful both her children are vaccinated.
Lauren Atkinson said that while she is as moderate as the wind blows, her family believes in vaccines and did not skip any immunizations during the pandemic. Vaccines were not an issue when she was a kid, she said, and as far as she was aware, everyone just got the shots. Now, Atkinson said, “People want to take a stand against government, against politicians, against people in power, and exemptions for vaccines is one of the easier ways to do so.”
None of the 15 Becker Primary School parents interviewed by The Post — three of whom said they opted against immunization for their kids — said they had any idea what the vaccination rates were in their school. Some said they believed it was none of their business what other families chose to do, while others were alarmed at the low rate.
Emily Jenkins, mom to twin first grade boys at Becker Primary School, moved to the area from the outer suburbs of the Twin Cities with her family for more space to work on race cars and ride 4-wheelers and snowmobiles — and for what she called its strong public schools. Living on 2.6 acres, she has tried out raw milk for her family and dines at a local restaurant that fries meals in beef tallow — popular dietary choices among supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement championed by Kennedy. But she said her sons are vaccinated, adding that the low vaccination rates worry her, she said.
“If there was an outbreak, or if there was a sickness going around, would I know about it? Because people around here are so closed up,” she said.
My comments:
There is much, much more to this article and I would encourage every parent, grandparent, or concerned adult to track down a copy of the full article at their local public library so that they can be informed about all the awful decisions Kennedy is pushing into law/practice that are harmful to you, your family, your community, and our entire country.
