CDC Calls on Local Officials to Get Kids Vaccinated as Participation Continues to Decline

Routine childhood vaccinations among kindergartners in U.S. public and private schools were down the previous school year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About 92.3 percent of kindergartners got the DTAP vaccine in the last school year, while 92.7 got the MMR vaccine, the agency said. The polio vaccine uptake range was 92.6 percent, while the varicella uptake was 92.4 percent, according to the CDC.
“Decreasing vaccination coverage and increasing exemptions increase the risk for vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks,” the agency said. “Efforts by health departments, schools, and providers are needed to ensure that students begin school fully vaccinated.”
At the same time, the vaccine exemption rate increased from 3 percent to 3.3 percent for the 2023–24 year and increased broadly in 41 jurisdictions. In 14 jurisdictions, that figure jumped to 5 percent, it said.
“The decreases in coverage, combined with increases in exemptions, jeopardize reaching the Healthy People 2030 95 percent coverage of kindergartners with MMR target,” the CDC report authors wrote. “The number of jurisdictions with exemption rates” greater than 5 percent increased from two in 2020-2021 to 14 in 2023-2024, they added.
Meanwhile, about 280,000 kindergartners “did not have documentation of 2 MMR doses and were potentially at risk for measles infection,” the agency added.
“These results could indicate changes in attitudes toward routine vaccination transferring from hesitancy about COVID-19 vaccination, or toward any vaccine requirements arising from objections to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, as well as a potential for larger decreases in coverage or increases in exemptions,” the CDC researchers wrote.
Americans also are less likely to say that the government should mandate that children receive vaccines such as the MMR and DTAP shots. Only 51 percent of respondents share this view, which is down 11 percentage points from 2019, or the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Gallup.
In a 1991 poll from Princeton Survey Research Associates, 81 percent of people favored vaccine mandates for children at the time, the pollster noted.
Less than half of respondents, or about 43 percent, have received or are planning to get one of the COVID-19 vaccines, the survey found.