Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing percentage of kindergarteners are starting school without the MMR vaccine and others required for school enrollment.
Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month show Ohio’s nonmedical exemption rate increased from 1.2% in 2009 to 2.4% by early 2020 among kindergarteners. This year, it reached 5.5%.
State law requires schools to allow students to claim medical exemptions to vaccine requirements – data shows that figure hasn’t changed much over the years.
But Ohio is also one of about 18 states that allows for personal objections to vaccine requirements for “reasons of conscience.” Data show increasing numbers of students are doing so.
Vaccines protect their recipients at the individual level. But when about 95% of a population is immunized, vaccines produce a “herd” effect that shields those with weaker immune systems or who can’t take vaccines for medical reasons. The increasing rate of exemptions threatens that herd immunity effect – the CDC estimates that only about 88% of Ohio kindergarteners this year have received both doses of the MMR vaccine.
Ohio’s kindergarten vaccine exemption rate sits above the national average of 4%, the data shows. From highest to lowest, Ohio ranks 16th.
The increasing rate of vaccine refusals comes as measles, a vaccine-preventable infectious disease that was until recently eliminated from the U.S., has come roaring back nationally and in Ohio and almost exclusively in unvaccinated people.
State health officials have announced three outbreaks (incidents where at least three people in a geographic area become infected) this year. In total, 15 people have contracted measles this year, 14 of whom were unvaccinated, according to the Ohio Department of Health. One state over, health officials in Pennsylvania announced the deaths of two people in Pennsylvania from measles, neither of whom were vaccinated.