The proportion of kids who are “exempt” from their school vaccinations is rising as anti-vax scare grips American parents.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that this is the case In the 2021-2022 school year, 2.6 percent of preschoolers in the U.S. had vaccine exemptions, up from 2.2 percent in the previous school year.
Non-medical exemptions, which are based on a parent’s religious or philosophical beliefs, are mainly behind the rise, suggesting that real health issues are not to blame.
The five states with the highest infant vaccination exemption rates are Idaho (9.8 percent), Utah (7.4 percent), Oregon (7 percent), Arizona (6.8 percent), and Wisconsin (6.3 percent).
The graph above shows the trend in overall vaccination, medical, and non-medical exemptions over the past eleven school years
The map above shows vaccine exemption rates by state for the 2021-2022 school year, highlighting the top five states with the highest exemption rates
For the 2021-2022 school year, 2.3 percent of preschoolers with some exemption had a non-medical exemption.
This share is an increase from the previous school year, when 1.9 percent had non-medical exemptions.
Children’s vaccinations for kindergarten include vaccinations to protect against chickenpox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, or even cough.
When it comes to medical waivers, which are allowed if a child has a medical condition that prevents them from getting a vaccine, that percentage has remained largely consistent over the past 11 school years.
For the 2021-2022 school year, only 0.2 percent of preschoolers had a medical exemption. A school year is measured from August to June of the following year.
The states with the lowest rates of vaccine exemptions are Mississippi, New York and West Virginia, all tied at 0.1 percent. California has a 0.2 percent rate and Washington, DC has a 0.5 percent rate.
Each state has different guidelines when it comes to school vaccination requirements and exemption guidelines. While some states may require all vaccines for kindergarten admission, others may require only a handful of vaccines at that time, deferring others to future classes.
When it comes to exemptions, they fall into two categories: medical and non-medical.
Only a handful of states do not allow religious or philosophical exemptions, including New York, California, Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi, and West Virginia.
There may be exemptions for one, several, or all of the required childhood vaccines. While rules vary by state, in most cases parents must receive documentation from a doctor stating that a child should be exempt from vaccinations.
The waivers are then reviewed and granted by the child’s school.
However, as the antivax movement has grown, so has the number of people filing false waivers, with some even willing to pay doctors to make up bogus medical excuses to avoid having their child vaccinated.
In some states, lawmakers are cracking down on this shady practice, even proposing legislation to stop bogus exemptions.
In 2019, California State Senator Richard Pan advocated for it a bill that would require the state health department to review all medical exemptions and approve or deny them. The bill also created a database to track which physicians grant an unusually high rate of waivers.
The bill was passed in September 2019.
And while a change of one or a half percentage points may not seem significant, it translates into thousands of children who could be left vulnerable to deadly diseases, compromising herd immunity against these diseases.
Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection that applies to infectious diseases. This is achieved when a sufficient percentage of the population has become immune to a disease, either through vaccination or previous infection.
A decrease in herd immunity can lead to outbreaks of previously eradicated diseases.
Experts have blamed the fall in U.S. vaccination rates in part on Covid-19. And while the Covid vaccine is not required for children attending school in the US, it is believed to be a contributing factor to the rise of vaccine hesitancy.
In the school year following the introduction of the Covid vaccines, more parents claimed vaccine exemptions: 2.6 percent in 2021-2022, compared to 2.2 percent in 2020-2021.
America’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, admitted that Covid vaccine policies were “counterproductive” and turned vaccine skeptics away from vaccines rather than winning their favor.
Earlier this year, Dr. Fauci said told The New York Times: “Man, I think almost paradoxically there were people who hesitated about getting vaccinated and thought, Why are they forcing me to do this?
‘And that sometimes beautiful, independent trait in our country is becoming counterproductive. And you have that smoldering anti-science feeling, a division that can be felt politically in this country.’