Childhood vaccine exemption rates hit a record high, CDC data shows
During the 2024-2025 school year, 4.1% of kindergartners — about 138,000 kids — had a vaccine exemption, surpassing the previous record high of 3.7% during the prior school year.
Nearly all exemptions are listed as nonmedical, meaning the kids aren't getting vaccines for religious or other personal reasons.
The data, reported Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comes as 2025 has logged the highest number of measles cases in 33 years: 1,333 cases in 39 states.
Dr. Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director of the CDC, said he expects the rate of vaccination exemptions to continue to rise as long as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a long-time anti-vaccine activist — is health and human services secretary.
'While these numbers are bad, they don't even begin to reflect the impact that Secretary Kennedy will have on future exemptions,' Besser said. 'No one has done more to instill fear and distrust of vaccines.'
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an email, 'That couldn't be further from the truth.'
'Vaccination remains the most effective way to protect children from serious diseases like measles and whooping cough, which can lead to hospitalization and long-term health complications,' Nixon said, adding that a family's decision to vaccinate is 'a personal one.'
Approximately 286,000 kindergartners last school year had no documentation that they'd ever had the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, the CDC said.
Those children were toddlers when the pandemic hit in 2020. The MMR vaccine is given in two doses beginning at age 1.
Just 92.5% of kids had their MMR and polio shots last year, and 92.1% had been vaccinated against tetanus and whooping cough.
Both percentages are decreases from the year before.
'A drop in coverage like that can make a huge difference for keeping a disease like measles at bay,' said Josh Michaud, an associate director within the Global Health Policy program at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy organization. 'Lower measles vaccination rates are a key driver for outbreaks like the ones we're seeing across many states this year.'
Measles is one of the most contagious viruses on Earth. Generally, 95% of the community must be vaccinated against it to prevent outbreaks.
While states have different vaccination requirements for attending public and most private schools, they generally include MMR, poliovirus and chickenpox vaccines, as well as DTaP, which covers diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis (also called whooping cough).
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