U.S. kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and the proportion of children with exemptions rose to an all-time high, according to federal data posted Wednesday.
The share of kids exempted from vaccine requirements rose to 3.3%, up from 3% the year before. Meanwhile, 92.7% of kindergartners got their required shots, which is a little lower than the previous two years. Before the COVID-19 pandemic the vaccination rate was 95%, the coverage level that makes it unlikely that a single infection will spark a disease cluster or outbreak.
The changes may seem slight but are significant, translating to about 80,000 kids not getting vaccinated, health officials say.
The rates help explain a worrisome creep in cases of whooping cough, measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases, said Dr. Raynard Washington, chair of the Big Cities Health Coalition, which represents 35 large metropolitan public health departments.
Short of medical, there shouldn’t be exemptions. Sorry if that offends anyone. No I take that back, I’m not sorry.
If you want to form your own polio colony, you can do that, but you stay there and don’t come out.
Guess “my body, my choice” stops mattering to you once it’s no longer politically useful, huh?
It stops mattering once it starts…
- Putting at risk populations beyond the individual at question
- Bringing back deadly infectious diseases that were nearing extinction (at least in the developed world)
Weird of you to have gone through their comment history and see what phrases they’ve used though.
Not at all. You can absolutely choose not to vaccinate. It just limits the places you’re able to work, or send your kids to school.
The freedom to swing your arms, ends at someone else’s nose. If you choose to set yourself up to spread a deadly infection, it makes sense for society to limit your chance of doing so.
You know why so many conservatives are rapists and plague rats?
Because in either case, they don’t care about the consent of the other people involved.
You want to give yourself smallpox or polio? Fucking go for it, bud. Nobody here is gonna stop you. But what you don’t have the right to is participate in activities where you could endanger other people.
So by all means, give yourself tuberculosis. Just stay the fuck away from civilized society when you do.
Why should our families be put at risk because you don’t understand science?
I get it, there are some people who genuinely can’t get vaccinated, so it’s all the more important to have everyone else vaccinated for herd immunity. Fucking idiots polio is gonna come back.
I’ve had every vaccine available including the one for meningococcal serogroup B, and I happen to know someone whose parents refused to vaccinate them for anything. We both lived in the same area and had the same level of social interaction.
My friend now suffers from chronic severe asthma due to a pertussis infection, in addition to cognitive impairment and deafness brought on by a meningococcal infection a couple of years after the pertussis infection. They’ve also had a bad case of influenza several times and they have had COVID-19 in recent years.
As others have stated, families shouldn’t be put at risk just because some people refuse to understand science.
Republicans: Let’s defund public schools so that everyone is stupid enough to believe what we say. Then we will tell them vaccines are harmful so they die and we lose voters. Oh, shit…
My personal conspiracy theory is big businesses want to kill off workers because automation is coming and they don’t want to pay taxes to support the people they’ve laid off. As a plus, it can prevent competitors from forming if there’s a straight up lack of knowledge in the sector.
So… what’s going to kill us all first: climate change, pandemic or global thermonuclear war?
Hooray! At least we’ll all go together when we go…
