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.
The cat loaf has spoken.
Guess “my body, my choice” stops mattering to you once it’s no longer politically useful, huh?
Abortions aren’t contagious, but infectious diseases are, so you have a civic responsibility to protect yourself and therefore the greater whole.
You thought you had something there, 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.
You can choose to be diseased, but inflicting it on others denies them the choice.
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.
Well that’s about the dumbest thing I’ve read since some republican talked.
Yes, because kids catching polio from some asshole who won’t vaccinate or otherwise care for their own kids is their choice and what they want. Yup, totally apt comparison. /s
For the sake of clarity, is this just basic trolling, or are you breathtakingly stupid?
It is their body, ther choice to stay away from the rest of society.
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.
Fucking idiots polio is gonna come back.
“Polio killed my children… and evil FEMINISTS did it.”
I wish I was joking because I knew this would never happen.
So… what’s going to kill us all first: climate change, pandemic or global thermonuclear war?
A pandemic of thermonuclear climate change.
Metal album when
Hooray! At least we’ll all go together when we go…
Climate Change into Pandemic with nukes going off near the end because there’s no longer enough control over them.
We seem to be heading towards all three at once. :/
God I hope it’s nuclear war
Unless rabies mutates to become airborne, a pandemic killing everyone is darn near impossible. So it will probably be using thermonuclear warheads on climate change induced hurricanes.
Yes.
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.
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.
