Even As Disease Outbreaks Abound, American Vaccination Rates In Children Fall
from the worse-before-it-gets-better dept
The past 18 months have seen a significant number of health issues, perhaps crises, arise in America. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough, and more have all been in the news. RFK Jr. is either stroking his pet conspiracy theories alongside Trump, or else he’s completely out to lunch. In the meantime, Kennedy is also continuing to sow doubts about vaccines generally, while also trying to claim he’s not, which helped result in a Trump executive order to reduce vaccination schedule recommendations for children. It’s as though this administration saw before it a four alarm fire and asked out loud, “How can we make this worse?”
And worse is likely to happen, because, despite all of this, the vaccination rates in American school children continues to fall.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday released data on the vaccination rates of US kindergarteners in the 2025–2026 school year, revealing that rates have once again decreased from the previous school year.
Vaccination rates have been slipping since the 2019–2020 school year, when the US had obtained rates of around 95 percent, the threshold needed to keep outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases from spreading in communities. The latest data shows the US is moving further away from that target.
Nationally, only 92.4 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the 2025–2026 school year, down from 92.5 percent last year. Coverage with the DTaP vaccine, which covers diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis (whooping cough), similarly fell from 92.1 percent to 92.0 percent.
This is bad quite generally, but it’s not equally bad in every state. And it’s very easy to demonstrate that state and local policies when it comes to vaccine requirements for school and the availability for non-religious exemptions are having quite the effect. This data is partially from the last school year, for instance, but it does a nice job highlighting the differences between states. In California, where exemptions face relatively tight requirements, 95.7% of kindergartners had the MMR vaccinations. In Florida, where the DeSantis administration has attempted to end all vaccination requirements for public schools, 88.9% of kindergartners had their MMR vaccinations.
The messaging from state and local leaders matters. The same is true for federal leaders. Public and health policy matter. And when we fall below herd immunity vaccination levels, the consequences are, well, precisely what we’re seeing out in the American wild at the moment.
If the overall number of exemptions exceeds 5 percent in any given location, it means that the location will not be able to achieve the 95 percent coverage target. Currently, 24 states have exemption rates at or above 5 percent. That’s up from 14 states in the 2023–2024 school year.
The data lands as vaccine-preventable diseases continue to rise and spread in the US. The country is on the verge of losing its measles elimination status as cases have reached a 34-year high and are still ticking upward. Last week, President Trump and Kennedy continued their efforts to undermine childhood vaccines, announcing an executive order to reduce the number of recommended vaccinations. The order has no scientific basis, and at a White House signing event, Trump and Kennedy spread vaccine falsehoods, misinformation, and disinformation.
This will get worse before it gets better, in other words. And the only real question is how many people have to get sick and/or die before we correct course.
Filed Under: anti-vaxxers, cdc, children, florida, health & human services, make america sick again, measles, mmr vaccine, rfk jr., ron desantis, vaccines
Comments on “Even As Disease Outbreaks Abound, American Vaccination Rates In Children Fall”
I just have to wonder
Is thing whole thing just another distraction? From Epstein, from Ukraine and Russia still at war, Trump losing to Iran, Trump’s dementia?
Re:
It’s an identity, and part of the broader MAGA identity.
The children of Trumpists will die and those Trumpists will insist it’s because of the vaccines their children didn’t get instead of the diseases those vaccines could’ve prevented. These are the same people who watched plenty of their politically like-minded brethren “win” Herman Cain Awards and thought the “award” was worse than the outcome needed for one to be “awarded”.
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Probably shouldn’t have lied about the last major epidemic, the efficacy of various precautions, it’s origins, and in particular the efficacy of the vaccine, then. (single digit effects, basically none)
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Yes, yes, you’d rather children be dead than autistic, we get it. Go lick a rat somewhere else, plague enthusiast.
Re: Critiquing the Medical Profession
Hello, friendly anti-vaxxer. Contrary to the impressions that one may get from my other comments, I’m actually a critic of the medical profession—and I want to arm you with my very best weapon for critiquing it. It’s the intellectual nuclear option for blasting the medical profession’s authority at its foundations!
The only catch: This analytical weapon is from a postmodern sociological theory that’s adjacent to Gender and Sexuality Studies. When I teach you how to wield it, as a beginner’s exercise, you’ll start by critiquing gender and sexual orientation. You will learn that heterosexuality is not “natural”—it’s a social construct, and it’s a very recent invention, at that! And gender? Pffft. So much of what people call “natural” about gender is such a flimsy construct, it’s definitely a suitable beginner’s exercise.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And impurify shall show you.
Along the way, you’ll have the opportunity to explore any latent queer and/or transgender feelings that you may have. By the time you graduate to dissecting doctors, you’ll probably be a queer genderfluid person who prefers they/them pronouns, and who enjoys polyamorous kink relationships with people of any gender.
Then and thence, such much win over the medics! Sound good?
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Yeah. How dare trump and his chosen leaders lie to you.
I hope you kill yourself after your kids die.
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Probably shouldn’t have skipped doing a little very basic* homework, instead of relying on Fox “News” and Alex Jones for your understanding of the world.
Whooping cough can kill newborns, their only protection is herd immunity.
Measles are very dangerous for babies, they also rely in herd immunity because they need to be at least 10-12 months old for the vaccine. The younger the child the higher the rate of possibly deadly complications. And do people know about Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE)? It’s a long-term complication of measles (number of cases estimations vary from 2 in 10.000 to 1 in 619, the latter in unvaccinated infants under 15 months). It kills slowly and there’s no cure. I do not wish this disease on anyone, let alone a child.
I’m so sorry for all the kids who will have to suffer because their parents choose to believe a charlatan.
I’m in my forties and I have a friend whose mother was anti-vax. He had all the so-called childhood disease I was spared. He was lucky not to have gotten any serious complications. His child has gotten all the vaccines because he knows what skipping them does to a child. And he wouldn’t let his little girl suffer needlessly.
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I had whooping cough as an adult (was originally vaccinated, tdap, as youth but it waned or never fully stuck) and it nearly took me out as a healthyish grown person. I had the amazing complication of pertussis emesis, coughing with such vigor it trigged a gagging or vagus nerve stimulation reaction, so I spent 3 days coughing, sucking air, glorfing up bile or hastily gulped water and pills, and repeating more or less continuously.
Luckily no one around caught it from me, due to Vaccination! huzzah!
Out of all the industries to do well 'Child-sized coffins' should never rise in the ranks...
So very many ‘parents’ undeserving of the title or job doing their damnedest to maim and/or murder their kids, a good many I’m sure because they fell for the debunked and moronic claim linking vaccination to autism and they’d rather their kids be dead than autistic.
Re: This scam isn’t even a fringe theory.
You probably know this, but it needs to be mentioned explicitly at every turn: There was never any scientific evidence that MMR causes autism. Zero. Zilch. The “evidence” was fake! It is not only debunked and moronic. It was never a mistake.
MMR-autism is not even a fringe theory. Fringe theories sometimes (rarely!) turn out to be true, or at least to have a kernel of truth. Sometimes, perhaps a very cautious person may be worried about the what-ifs of a fringe theory.
MMR-autism is a financially-motivated fraud from start to finish. Someone literally just made it up as a scam to put cash in his pocket. It has no kernel of truth, and it has no chance of turning out to be true. Only people who are grossly ignorant and/or batshit crazy are worried even a little bit about MMR causing autism.
Re: ". . . they’d rather their kids be dead than autistic."
They don’t believe that “dead” is a possibility. This is a quite fundamental issue: a huge number of people who believe the world is naturally safe for humans, and nothing bad can happen to them, unless other humans do it.
They get that way via religion, denial, or self-delusion, but the outcome is the same. They behave like fools, feeling that they aren’t at risk, and any bad outcomes are someone else’s fault. It describes Trump’s presidency quite well.
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I’m sure because they fell for the debunked and moronic claim linking vaccination to autism and they’d rather their kids be dead than autistic.
I wonder what they’ll say if they happen to see an autistic kid that wasn’t vaccinated? It’ll be head-exploding like in Scanners, except with less brain-matter.
Re: Re: ☣️ Andrew Wakefield’s Big Lie about MMR
In the scientific study published 28 years ago that established the MMR-autism causal link, some of the kids had been diagnosed as autistic before they received their first MMR shot. And some of the “autistic” kids were not autistic. And… That’s barely scratching the surface of the fraud. The hidden truth was in the children’s medical records, which were confidential by law.
It was all a scam. There was never any real evidence that MMR causes autism. The study was a Big Lie.
The doctor who faked the data had multiple undisclosed financial motives to scare people off of MMR. For him, it was all about money and fame. Before the fraud was exposed, the world hailed him as a controversial genius who perhaps may get the Nobel Prize in Medicine. He’s now an ex-doctor, having been un-doctored by medical authorities who don’t like fraud.
With his medical career burnt, he turned to attacking all vaccines with a Gish gallop of any scary-sounding arguments he can make. He represents himself to his followers as the heroic victim of a medical-pharmaceutical conspiracy to suppress the truth about vaccines—a living martyr who sacrificed his career to protect children. Oh, what a saint!
He’s made lots of money as an anti-vaxxer. And he has his revenge on the world: He brought back measles, which is only the beginning. Oh, what revenge! He kills children, he destroys what the medical authorities built for generations, he raises plagues like a god punishing the world, and he’s laughing all the way to the bank.
That’s ☣️ Andrew Wakefield ☣️. Donald Trump likes him.
☞ Source of facts: Brian Deer (2020). The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Deer compares Wakefield to Dr. Harold Shipman, a charismatic serial killer who enjoyed murdering his patients as they praised how much he cared about them. On the very first page of the prologue, Deer reports that Wakefield was invited to Trump’s inaugural ball on January 20, 2017.
The book needs an update for EO #14420 (2026-08-10), which looks very Wakefieldish to me. Splitting up MMR is 1990s vintage Wakefield, an original part of his scam; Deer reports that Wakefield filed for patents on a new monovalent measles vaccine while he was attacking MMR with his fake study.
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No more "religious exemptions"
If a parent claims this, then we should (a) execute the parent (b) vaccinate the child (c) get on with our day. There’s no need to allow such mass-murdering parents to turn their children into disease carriers who kill our children because they’re primitive savages who are stupid enough to believe in ghosts in the sky.
Re: Trump ordered the enforcement of “religious exemptions”. [second try]
Why did people flag the parent comment? It makes some extreme, or perhaps hyperbolic suggestions—but it raises an important point: The “religious exemptions” need to stop! As noted below, I tried to reply to this yesterday.
EO #14420 §4 directs the Attorney General, the DOJ, the Department of Education, and HHS to enforce “obligations to provide religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements” on states and localities. This is couched in terms of “parental authority” and “religious freedom”—key phrases which are bait for Trump’s rabid pet SCOTUS, and for many trumped-up Federal judges at the circuit and district levels.
Trump patently wants to force your children to be exposed to unvaccinated children in the confined germ-factories known as schools. Is anyone paying attention? I am the only person whom I have seen mention this, as I’ve done repeatedly since August 14, 2026. Read the fucking EO, Section 4!
Even the part about “medical exemptions” alarms me. I don’t think that anyone denies medical exemptions for real reasons—such as for immunocompromised people, or those with other conditions that actually contraindicate vaccination. Why would Trump need to order the enforcement of medical exemptions?
—SNIP—
This is the my second attempt to post this comment. The original was longer, posted yesterday. It was my second comment within 24 hours to vanish without a trace, with no moderation message, and never to show up later—as insta-vanished comments sometimes do, when I suppose a human moderator notices them languishing in a shitpile?
I infer that a robot probably thought this one was medical misinformation. I identified several infamous quack doctors by name, I mentioned several quack Covid treatments by name, and I hyperlinked fact-based news articles about how much money the quacks have made. My purpose was to suggest that “medical exemptions” cannot be trusted, when the medical profession is now infested with anti-vaxxer quack doctors.
(In a different thread, my other vanished comment mentioned several times a word for the self-termination of human life—as part of the proper noun “S–cide Girls”, with a link to an art-news article about how the S–cide Girls trolled rip-off artist Richard Prince in 2015.)
Of course, those are only my best guesses of what the very intelligent robot was probably “thinking”. Is it “artificially intelligent”? I do know that robots make human discourse difficult.
Two more years of getting worse. That is, if the orange baboon doesn’t go for his 3rd term.
“But Ninja, it’s forbidden by the Constitution (or whatever legal framework)!”
Yeah, like a ton of things that are now normal in the US.
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I do wonder whether the GOP is ready to reckon with the idea of Trump actually trying to hold onto his power after the 2028 election. Like, do they think he’s actually building that ballroom with all that military stuff attached to it for future presidents?
Re: Re:
I told everyone who would listen (and some who wouldn’t) that 2024 was the last election, in any real sense of “election”. The GOP has no intention of giving up power — and why should they? Nixon got away with it half a century ago and the norms that barely saved the country back then are long gone.
I fully expect Trump to declare a national emergency sometime in the next ten weeks and order the indefinite postponement of elections. (Yeah, supposedly he can’t do that, but who’s going to stop him?) Any state that tries to proceed will find its election officials arrested by ICE and its polling places occupied by the military.
I truly hope I’m wrong. But I believe it would be a mistake to put anything past Trump and his enablers.
Re: Re: The obvious problem that no one is noticing.
Since early 2025, I have observed a worse problem, an obvious problem that I’ve never seen anyone mention anywhere. Maybe I missed something somewhere, but it seems to me that people are blinkered by fear.
Starting straight from the start of Trump 47, the Trump regime has overcommitted itself by committing so many crimes of such grave magnitude, they’ve painted themselves into a corner. They can never afford to lose power. Losing power has consequences. Losing power equals going to prison. There will, there must be such a reckoning that chicanery with presidential pardons and Trumpfied SCOTUS precedents cannot adequately protect them.
The regime losing power means that Trump, some members of the Trump family, numerous Trump administration officials, many other Republican big-shots, and probably a few billionaires are all at imminent risk of prison. Trump is ruling this country like it’s a chicken game where he’s unscrewed his steering wheel, and thrown it out the window. And he knows it. Selling a “Trump 2028” campaign hat since early 2025 is not mere puffery.
Desperate thugs who are cornered will do desperate things. If they have the actual, real-world power to do desperate things, then the constitution and laws of the United States aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
November 2026 may well be our last-ever realistic chance to get out of this mess by peaceful, constitutional means. Trump has not yet fully consolidated his dictatorship. The constitutional form of government has already been overthrown by a self-coup, as of 2025. But enough of its tattered remains are still in place that if the Democrats regain firm control of the Federal legislature in 2026, and if they spend the next two years fighting tooth and nail to check the dictatorial power of the “unitary executive” (instead of kissing Republican ass for “bipartisanship”), then perhaps we may have a chance to obtain a peaceful transfer of power in 2029—well, maybe almost as “peaceful” as we had in 2021, or have we forgotten that?
Otherwise, if you have any Russian friends, you may want to ask them if they can please vote Putin out of power. Note that it took Putin over twenty years fully to consolidate his dictatorship, but Trump is moving much, much faster.
Disclosure: As a stubborn independent, I have always disliked the Democratic Party. (Actually, I dislike the whole system.) I’m stumping for the Dems here because where history in 2026, supporting the Democrats is so obviously needed for bare survival. Anyone who doesn’t is either a MAGA cult drone, or a suicidally stupid ideologue who’d rather purity-spiral themselves fully into a Putin-style regime than vote (D). If/when we have the Democrats restore a functioning constitutional government with the most basic civil liberties, then we will have the luxury of working for something better.
Re: Re: Re:
Very insightful — unfortunately. I have nothing to add to it so I’ll confine myself to responding to your disclosure with one of my own: I’m also an independent: always have been. I’ve always tried to identify and vote for the candidate whose views most closely reflect mine, with additional considerations of intelligence, experience, and competence. Because I’m a liberal, that almost always means Democrats – -but not 100% of the time. I’ve voted for some Republicans that I felt were close enough on policy but better qualified — and willing to work together. (Barry Goldwater famously observed that politics and governing demand compromise. He was right.)
However, this time around is different. I have to put aside my personal preferences and policy positions in favor of one overriding question: what’s the best path to saving my country? One of things that this is going to mean, unfortunately, is that I’m not going to vote for a local candidate who I happen to know and who has done good work in the community for years. I’d like to; but I can’t — because he’s running as a Republican, and I regard it as my civic duty to avoid giving any support of any kind to any GOP politician at any level.
I told him this, in person. Of course he wasn’t happy about it, who would be? And I’m sure in doing so that I damaged our relationship, and I’m sorry about that. But I’ll worry about mending that fence, if I have the opportunity, later. Right now my only concern is stopping Trump at all costs.
Re: Re: Re:2 Facing Political Reality
Thanks for the kind words. You lead by example: It takes social courage to inform your Republican politician friend that he doesn’t have your vote, and to explain to him why. I hope that if he so cares about his community, he eventually comes to realize that this is not the Republican Party of a distant past in which, I’m now ashamed to admit, I myself occasionally voted for Republicans.
(Hey, Stormy Daniels used to be a Republican (!). It was a very long time ago.)
I think that a large part of why we’re in this dire situation is that too many people lack that social courage. Indeed, most people tend to avoid even the slightest friction; they go along to get along. They fear interpersonal discomfit more than they fear the consolidation of an absolute dictatorship armed with electronic mass-surveillance (now empowered by “AI”!), numerous Federal police and military forces, a gargantuan ICE which has already shown a taste for shooting U.S. citizens in the street and could be ordered to do exactly that, a growing archipelago of immigrant-gulags that could just as well hold U.S. citizens, border controls that can keep people in just as well as they keep people out… A future in which neither fight nor flight is a practical option, but only submission or death…
I’m glad to hear talk about local elections. Almost forty years ago, the Christian Right started working at their church-going grassroots to install local municipal and especially, school board officials in the quiet little races that most people ignore. Strategically in tandem, they worked bottom-up while they also worked top-down. They’ve paid attention even to local offices seemingly so insignificant, their candidate can sometimes run unopposed! And this strategy works. Every office matters.
From what you say, I’m much more far-out than you. I’m a self-identified radical. I meant what I obliquely said about “the whole system”. I say it obliquely, because we need people to engage with the system—not to be alienated therefrom.
To me, Trump took us out of the frying pan and into the fire. Nowadays, I am fully engaged with the frying pan in a desperate attempt to climb back into it. Oh, and Trump has made me revise my opinions about Big Government and its Administrative State. Bureaucratic “institutional guardrails” contained Trump 45. Trump 47 mass-fired the bureaucrats to rip out the guardrails. I used to hate bureaucrats; now, I want to make love to bureaucrats all night long.
This past decade has delivered a harsh object lesson in political reality, which can be ignored only to the detriment of my ideals—and to the peril of my most basic liberties.
Re: Re:
I do wonder whether the GOP is ready to reckon with the idea of Trump actually trying to hold onto his power after the 2028 election.
Holding onto power is the least of his worries. That geriatric pile of shit has enough trouble with stairs and using a water bottle with only 1 hand. They’re going to have to do some serious McConnell-sized horseshit if he even makes it to 2028.
Book Recommendation (expose the conspiracy!)
I dislike the unqualified term “conspiracy theory”. Unfounded conspiracy theories are nonsense. But conspiracies do exist. Investigators need to piece the conspiracies together like puzzles, connect the dots, reveal the conspirators’ secrets. The truth is out there.
There is an international organized group of pure evil. They are infinitely malicious to humans. They are a (quasi-)religion, and their god is money. They are almost praeternaturally cunning, and their weapons are lies and deception. They literally control the U.S. Federal government. They lead a fifth column of dupes and shills. They spread plagues from sheer malevolence. They commit child sacrifice. For our own protection, we really need to isolate them from the rest of society—or at least, make them wear some external mark so we can recognize them, stay away, and avoid being exposed to their contamination.
They are the Anti-Vaxxer Conspiracy. (And for fuck’s sake, dear internet, I must note that most of them are Gentiles. 🙄)
———
The book’s blurb: “Investigative reporter Brian Deer exposes a conspiracy of fraud and betrayal behind attacks on a mainstay of medicine: vaccinations.” #Truth
Ooh, a conspiracy. Well, it’s published by Johns Hopkins University Press. That’s not a stereotypical conspiracy theory site.
Published in September 2020. The title: The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines. The ex-doctor in question is Andrew Wakefield.
Of course, I already know bits and pieces of the story; I haven’t been totally living under a rock for the past three decades. I even vaguely recall having seen some of Deer’s newspaper articles which broke the fraud scandal about twenty years ago. What could be new here?
I open to the beginning of Chapter 1. The very first sentence mentions Donald Trump.
I feel like I just tumbled down the rabbit hole.
Also, as I read further, I feel like I have been living under a rock.
People who follow these issues more closely may shake their heads at my woeful tardiness in reading this book. Fine. Put a dunce cap on me for this comment. Evidently, way too many people are unaware of important details of this story.
Everyone who hasn’t read this book already, needs to read it right fucking now. When an anti-vaxxer president issues EO #14420 while an anti-vaxxer is U.S. Secretary of Health, this book needs to be trending.
———
I examine the author’s history—which he proudly recounts in the book, and which is quite verifiable. In the course of his career, Deer had several times exposed dangerous drugs inflicted on patients by carelessness, or even scientific fraud in the pharmaceutical industry. He’d protected vaccination by reporting on fraudulent attacks on the DTP vaccine. But he’d also exposed AidsVax—a fake project to develop an HIV vaccine, funded with taxpayer money by corrupt staffers at the American CDC. His platform was the British Sunday Times, a newspaper that historically had carpet-bombed headline coverage of thalidomide—arguably the worst pharmaceutical scandal in history. By his own history, Deer surely isn’t a mouthpiece for the medical establishment, nor a shill for Big Pharma.
The book’s style is that of the true crime genre. I personally dislike this style; for such a serious issue, I would prefer an academic style. However, the book is well-written to be engaging and popularly accessible. That’s important for an issue where a conspiracy of sophisticated bullshitters has brainwashed much of the public; I guess that’s likely why a book in this style is published by a university press! I do wish that the book had an academic-style bibliography; although Deer is a primary source for much of his own investigative reporting, he also refers to (or rather, informally mentions) many other sources that will be difficult to track down without proper citations; historians who would otherwise find this book a useful roadmap will tear their hair out about this. The book does have a useful index.
Everyone needs to read this book right fucking now. If it were now trending in the popular discourse, that would beneficially reframe and refocus much of the news about current events.
#Truth #ExposeTheConspiracy
It’s really a strange thing watching our country intentionally become a third world shithole.
The King is mad! (How convenient!)
Many, possibly most, “Republican” politicians are not only “reckoning with” it — they’re counting on it.
A lot of these “representatives” are not merely beholden to deep-pocketed lobbyists, but are fully on board with Project 2025 theocrats eager to implement the New American Gilead, and/or oligarchic techno-feudalism, and/or reborn white supremacist apartheid (yes, those allegiances have a disturbing amount of overlap).
It’s not happenstance that Mike Johnson and JD Vance (and Vought, Hegseth, Miller, certain SCOTUS Justices, etc) are ensconced in their present positions, and show no interest in evicting King Donald from his — Donald Trump (a.k.a. the mad King) is damn useful to those interests right where he is, and they aren’t interested in deposing him when they can prop him up instead and act more effectively under cover of his cultish banner.
They don’t care about the collateral damage. Most of it, they don’t necessarily even consider to be damage and they’re playing for stakes that make them not care about the rest.
Holding on to power after the 2028 election is the whole damn point. It’s been the whole damn point since before Trump ran for office… they just didn’t figure to achieve it so quickly and so shamelessly until Trump came along to act as a catalyst.