According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly a quarter of a million kindergarten children are vulnerable to measles due to a drop in vaccination coverage during the pandemic.
The CDC, in a report released Thursday, found that 93% of kindergarteners were up to date with state-required vaccines in the 2021-22 school year, down 2% from 2019-20.
“While this may not seem significant, it does mean that nearly 250,000 kindergarten children are potentially unprotected from meat,” said Dr. Georgina Peacock, chief of the CDC’s Immunization Services Division, said in a call with reporters Thursday.
“And we know that measles, mumps and rubella vaccination coverage for kindergarteners is the lowest in over a decade,” Peacock said.
Kindergarten children should be vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella; varicella; Politics; and diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rate was 93.5% in the 2021-22 school year, below the 95% coverage target to prevent outbreaks.
An ongoing measles outbreak in Columbus, Ohio has spread to 83 children, 33 of whom have been hospitalized. None of the children died. The overwhelming majority of children, 78 years old, were not vaccinated.
“These outbreaks harm children and significantly disrupt their opportunities to learn, grow and thrive,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases. “It’s alarming and should be a call to action for all of us.”
The CDC report looked at whether kindergartners received the second dose of their measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. Two doses are 97% effective in preventing the disease and one dose is about 93% effective, according to the CDC.
Measles is a highly contagious virus that is spread when someone coughs or sneezes and contaminates the air, where the virus can linger for up to two hours. It can also be spread when a person touches a contaminated surface and then touches their eyes, nose or mouth.
The virus is so contagious that a single person can transmit the virus to 90% of their relatives who are not immune from vaccination or previous infection, according to the CDC.
Measles can be dangerous for children under 5, adults over 20, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.
About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people who catch it are hospitalized. About 1 in 20 children get pneumonia and 1 in 1,000 have brain swelling that can lead to disabilities. Symptoms begin with high fever, cough, runny nose, and red eyes. White spots appear in the mouth two to three days later, and a rash appears on the body.
CDC officials said disruptions to schools and the healthcare system during the Covid pandemic are largely responsible for the drop in vaccination rates.
“We know the pandemic has really disrupted health systems,” Peacock said. “Part of that is because healthy child visits may have been missed and people are still trying to catch up on those healthy child visits.”
“We know the schools had a lot of things to focus on and in some cases they may not have been able to pull together all of this immunization documentation,” Peacock said. Or because the kids were home for much of the pandemic, that may not have been the focus as they focused on testing and all that other pandemic stuff.
In a separate report released Thursday, the CDC found that coverage of what’s called the combined seven-vaccine series actually increased slightly among children born in 2018-19 by the time they turned two, compared to compared to children born in 2016-17.
This series of seven vaccines includes vaccines against measles, varicella, poliomyelitis, hepatitis B, streptococcus pneumoniae, haemophilus influenzae or Hib, and diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.
However, the CDC found that there were significant disparities in income and race. Vaccination coverage has declined by up to 5% during the pandemic for people living below the poverty line or in rural areas. Black and Hispanic children had lower vaccination rates than white children.
O’Leary said that while misinformation about vaccines is a problem, the vast majority of parents continue to have their children vaccinated. He said inequality is the biggest problem.
“The things we really need to focus on are access and child poverty,” O’Leary said.
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