Preschoolers in the United States were behind on routine childhood vaccinations during the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday, a slide experts attributed to skipped checkups and to a tidal wave of resistance to Covid-19 gunshots that turned into unease. about other vaccines.
During the 2020-21 school year, about 94 percent of preschoolers had the required vaccines, down about one percentage point from the previous school year, the CDC said. That brought coverage levels below the target of 95 percent, raising fears that life-threatening childhood illnesses like measles might become more prevalent at some point.
“This means there are 35,000 children in the United States during this time without documentation of full vaccination against common diseases,” said Dr. Georgina Peacock, the acting director of the CDC’s immunization services division, at a news conference Thursday. “This is further evidence of how pandemic-related disruptions to education and health care can have lasting effects on children.”
Kindergarten enrollment was also down about 10 percent, said Dr. Peacock, meaning about 400,000 additional children who were expected to attend school but did not, may also be behind on routine vaccinations.
Some states showed a dramatic decline in coverage, while others remained more stable. Maryland, for example, reported a roughly 10 percent drop in measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine coverage from the 2019-20 to 2020-21 school year among preschoolers. Wisconsin, Georgia, Wyoming and Kentucky all reported declines of about 5 percent.
Idaho had one of the lowest coverage levels during the 2020-21 school year with the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, at 86.5 percent.
The CDC said coverage had dropped in a majority of states. Virginia, Kansas and Alabama were among a small number of states that reported higher vaccination rates against measles, mumps and rubella in the past school year.
CDC scientists stressed that additional barriers to reporting vaccination data during the pandemic, including reduced staff numbers and difficulties in collecting information from parents, could also have artificially lowered recorded coverage levels in some places.
Nationally, vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines fell just below 94 percent; the diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis vaccine; and for the varicella vaccine, the CDC said. The United States had already nearly lost its status as the country that had eradicated measles in 2019. In that year, the country experienced an unusually high number of measles outbreaks in communities where vaccination levels had fallen.
Scientists at the CDC attributed the decline in coverage in part to missed child health checkups, which pediatricians said some families avoided during the pandemic for fear of coming in contact with children with Covid. The agency said disruptions to education, including relaxed immunization requirements for remote students and heavy demands on school nurses, could also have contributed to reduced vaccination rates.
Pediatricians said in interviews that those issues had also clashed with the increasing amount of vaccine misinformation targeting the coronavirus shots, which they said had also fueled more resistance to common vaccines.
“There is a higher proportion of parents questioning routine vaccines,” said Dr. Jason V. Terk, a pediatrician who practices in suburban Dallas and who also serves as a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“The experience of the pandemic and the agenda-driven misinformation that has been pushed out regarding Covid vaccines,” he added, “had fueled the fire of mistrust and skepticism that is actually a kind of new pandemic of hesitation for routine vaccines. †
Public health experts also noted a move by some state lawmakers to impose new restrictions around requiring vaccines, though they said many bills were still pending.
The CDC study found no evidence of a wave of families seeking waivers during the pandemic: It said the percentage of preschoolers with an exemption for one or more required vaccines was 2.2 percent in 2020-21, similar to the figure a was reported years earlier.
The agency said it estimated vaccination rates based on counts from federally funded immunization programs that work with schools and local education departments to research students’ vaccination and exemption status. It noted that at times the pandemic had disrupted efforts to collect and report on vaccination data and that estimates of national coverage for 2020-21 include only 47 of the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Earlier in the pandemic, signs of declining childhood vaccination rates had emerged, including reduced vaccine orders from states as part of a federally funded program for uninsured patients.
dr. Gary Kirkilas, a pediatrician in Phoenix who cares for patients whose families are often poor or homeless, said conversations about vaccines with the families of pre-kindergarten children are often straightforward. After all, he said, the injections needed at that age are often effective booster-dose vaccines given at a younger age.
But he said vaccinating children in families that were transient, unaccustomed to regular doctor visits, or suspicious of the medical community, required special attention. Skipping child welfare checks during the pandemic exacerbated those problems, said Dr. Kirkilas.
And as a segment of families arrived eager for their children to receive vaccines to protect against Covid and other diseases, another was more resistant than ever.
“All the rumor about childhood vaccines and misinformation going on at the time – that kind of reinforced that particular segment of families where ‘I’m suspicious of the flu vaccine and then suspicious of the Covid vaccine. and maybe I’m starting to distrust vaccines in general,” he said.
CDC scientists said they were hopeful that the return of personal education would accelerate efforts to catch up with children on routine vaccines. They encouraged schools to send reminders to families whose children were behind and said doctors’ offices should warn families that children should have extra shots.
