More American Families Are Refusing Vaccines

As millions of children around the country start another school year, they’ll be confronting new classes, new teachers, and, inevitably, a new slate of germs.

And this fall, they’ll be more vulnerable to infectious disease than children have been in decades.

Earlier this month, President Trump signed yet another executive order insisting that the United States shrink its schedule of recommended vaccines—federal guidance that currently guards Americans against 17 diseases with safe, effective shots.

He also demanded that the U.S. split the MMR vaccine into three separate courses for measles, mumps, and rubella, without citing solid scientific evidence or acknowledging the infeasibility of such a system. (Scholars have already questioned whether the order has legal power.) Days later, the CDC released new data showing that, under Trump, the nationwide vaccine-exemption rate among kindergartners has reached a record high.

The new exemption rate of 4.2 percent is a relatively modest bump, up from the previous school year’s 3.6.

The national numbers, though, paper over widening gaps among states.

Roughly 98 to 99 percent of West Virginia kindergartners, for instance, are still getting routine shots.

Meanwhile, in Idaho, the percentage of kindergartners who are up-to-date on vaccines that guard against diseases such as polio, chickenpox, and measles has tumbled to about 75 percent—well below the estimated thresholds for reliably staving off such outbreaks.

These numbers reflect what Thomas Patterson, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Idaho chapter, has been seeing and hearing in the hospitals and clinics where he works: more families expressing skepticism, more families refusing or delaying shots, and more families opting out of his care after he reveals that he supports all of the vaccines that the AAP recommends. (The professional society has sued Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services over its attempts to pare down vaccine recommendations.) Idaho also bans employers, schools, and day cares from requiring medical interventions, including vaccines.

Its vaccine-exemption rate is now 17.5 percent , the highest in the nation.

National polls show that the majority of Americans still think vaccines work well to prevent disease, and that at least two-thirds support requiring vaccines in schools.

Those sentiments remain especially common in Democratic strongholds.

Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician in Atlanta, told me that in the past year and a half, she and her colleagues have been flooded with calls from families who are worried that the vaccines they want for their children could soon be taken away.