More and more children are not getting vaccinated across the United States, recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has shown.
Collating information from a variety of sources, the CDC’s figures indicate that vaccine coverage has gone down in kindergartners in more than 30 states in the 2023 to 2024 school year, compared with previous years.
Meanwhile, the percentage of children with vaccination exemptions has gone up in 40 states, increasing nationally from 3 percent in 2022 to 2023 to 3.3 percent in the 2023 to 2024 school year.
This means that the number of kindergartners exempt from one or more vaccines was approximately 127,000 during the 2023 to 2024 school year.
At the same time, approximately 280,000 American kindergartners were attending school without documentation showing they had completed a series of measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines.
These trends reflect the rising rates of vaccination skepticism in the U.S., catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and which may experience another boost with President-elect Donald Trump’s pick of notorious vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary.
State and regional governments across the U.S. have also been pushing back against federal vaccination recommendations, and cases of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles have risen in the U.S. and worldwide.
Newsweek has approached the CDC for comment via email.
The CDC’s figures show that, in 14 states, more than 5 percent of this year’s kindergartners have had vaccine exemptions claimed on their behalf: Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
This was the case in only seven states five years ago, in the 2018 to 2019 school year— Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Oregon, Utah and Wisconsin—and in six states 10 years ago, in the 2013 to 2014 school year.
Idaho seems to be a hotspot for vaccination exemption among kindergartners. According to CDC census data, this applied to 14.3 percent of kindergartners in the 2023 to 2024 school year, up from 12.1 percent the year before and 7.6 percent pre-pandemic.
Other states with the highest rates of vaccination exemption include Alaska at 9.5 percent, Utah at 9.3 percent, Oregon at 8.9 percent and Arizona at 8.5 percent.
At the other end of the spectrum, nine states have vaccination exemption percentages of less than 2 percent: California, Connecticut, Maine (which notably had a high rate five years ago) Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island and West Virginia.
The lowest national rates of vaccine exemption can be found in California, New York and West Virginia, all of which have a 0.1 percent rate of exemption among 2023-24’s kindergartners.
Rates of medical exemption to vaccinations have been steady, at 0.2 to 0.3 percent, since 2011—while non-medical exemption wobbled around 1.9 to 2 percent in the 2010s until the pandemic, when it—along with overall exemption rates—rose from 1.9 percent in 2020 to 2021 to 3.1 percent this past school year.
Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about measles? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
