US kindergarten vaccination rates dip as exemptions hit record high

New CDC data shows MMR vaccination among kindergarteners declining slightly as non-medical exemptions climb to 4.2%

A week after Donald Trump made a series of misleading claims about vaccines – including that some injections look “like the size of a soda bottle” – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the latest data on national kindergarten vaccination rates.

CDC communications downplayed the changes – a three-sentence announcement said, “overall vaccination rates among kindergarteners remained high” – but medical experts immediately saw cause for concern in the trends.

“There’s been a decrease in immunization rates in all vaccines. There’s a decrease in immunizations in more than half the states, as opposed to the year before. There are at least 280,000 kindergarteners who did not get the [measles, mumps and rubella vaccine],” said Dr Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (Chop).

Additionally, non-medical exemptions for vaccines for kindergarteners grew by 17% over the last school year – the highest single-year increase ever, from 3.6% to 4.2% nationwide.

Pediatricians, local health officials and vaccine experts, such as Offit, described the latest vaccine data as evidence of how the administration – through almost too many means to enumerate – has sowed confusion about the safety and benefits of vaccines, leading to depressed vaccination rates and parents’ efforts to opt-out.

“If we had a secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) who was an actual secretary of HHS instead of an anti-vaccine activist and science denialist, he would stand up in front of the American public and say, ‘Vaccinate your children.’ – please, vaccinate your children,” he said.

Even so, the picture is not entirely bleak. The overwhelming majority of American parents still vaccinate their children. Data released by the CDC showed that vaccination dropped by only 0.1% between the last two school years, to 92.4% of children vaccinated with the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

While there is a high overall rate of vaccination, parents who refuse vaccination are not evenly distributed around the United States. Often, low vaccination rates are found in pockets, such as in Idaho or Ohio. The US is currently experiencing the worst year for measles since 1991 , where there have been hundreds of cases in Utah and South Carolina.

“In Cleveland, for example, a couple years ago, our percentage of kindergartners being up-to-date on vaccines was 68%,” said Dr David Margolius, director of the Cleveland Department of Public Health. “This past school year, we’re up to 76%. We are doing the work.”

However, “the federal government is causing more and more confusion, and that’s washing out the effects and the work that all of us are trying to do,” Margolius added.

Vaccines have saved millions of lives globally. Widespread measles vaccination alone is credited with saving 59 million lives between 2000 and 2024, according to the World Health Organization .