U.S. kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and the proportion of children with exemptions rose to an all-time high, according to federal data posted Wednesday.
The share of kids exempted from vaccine requirements rose to 3.3%, up from 3% the year before. Meanwhile, 92.7% of kindergartners got their required shots, which is a little lower than the previous two years. Before the COVID-19 pandemic the vaccination rate was 95%, the coverage level that makes it unlikely that a single infection will spark a disease cluster or outbreak.
The changes may seem slight but are significant, translating to about 80,000 kids not getting vaccinated, health officials say.
The rates help explain a worrisome creep in cases of whooping cough, measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases, said Dr. Raynard Washington, chair of the Big Cities Health Coalition, which represents 35 large metropolitan public health departments.
Short of medical, there shouldn’t be exemptions. Sorry if that offends anyone. No I take that back, I’m not sorry.
If you want to form your own polio colony, you can do that, but you stay there and don’t come out.
The cat loaf has spoken.
Why should our families be put at risk because you don’t understand science?
I get it, there are some people who genuinely can’t get vaccinated, so it’s all the more important to have everyone else vaccinated for herd immunity. Fucking idiots polio is gonna come back.
Fucking idiots polio is gonna come back.
“Polio killed my children… and evil FEMINISTS did it.”
I wish I was joking because I knew this would never happen.
So… what’s going to kill us all first: climate change, pandemic or global thermonuclear war?
A pandemic of thermonuclear climate change.
Metal album when
Hooray! At least we’ll all go together when we go…
Climate Change into Pandemic with nukes going off near the end because there’s no longer enough control over them.
We seem to be heading towards all three at once. :/
Unless rabies mutates to become airborne, a pandemic killing everyone is darn near impossible. So it will probably be using thermonuclear warheads on climate change induced hurricanes.
God I hope it’s nuclear war
Yes.
Republicans: Let’s defund public schools so that everyone is stupid enough to believe what we say. Then we will tell them vaccines are harmful so they die and we lose voters. Oh, shit…
My personal conspiracy theory is big businesses want to kill off workers because automation is coming and they don’t want to pay taxes to support the people they’ve laid off. As a plus, it can prevent competitors from forming if there’s a straight up lack of knowledge in the sector.
I’ve had every vaccine available including the one for meningococcal serogroup B, and I happen to know someone whose parents refused to vaccinate them for anything. We both lived in the same area and had the same level of social interaction.
My friend now suffers from chronic severe asthma due to a pertussis infection, in addition to cognitive impairment and deafness brought on by a meningococcal infection a couple of years after the pertussis infection. They’ve also had a bad case of influenza several times and they have had COVID-19 in recent years.
As others have stated, families shouldn’t be put at risk just because some people refuse to understand science.
