Last month, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia experienced a measles outbreak when several unvaccinated children contracted the disease. The city’s public health department issued an alert on Jan. 4: “The City is working to identify everyone who may have been exposed, checking their vaccine status, warning them that they may have been exposed, and issuing quarantine and exclusion recommendations where necessary.”
The alert explains the dangers children face: One in five unvaccinated people with measles is hospitalized. In addition, as many as one out of 20 children with measles gets pneumonia, and nearly one to three of every 1,000 children with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the hospital’s Vaccine Education Center, told NBC News, “Measles is the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases, so when you lower immunization rates, that’s the first disease to come back.”
Sadly, immunization rates are declining, and the Biden administration deserves some of the blame.
As pediatricians can attest, it’s getting harder to convince parents to vaccinate their kids against measles and other childhood diseases like mumps, polio and pertussis.
Only 93 percent of kindergarteners had received an MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine in the 2021-2022 school year — below both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) target of 95 percent as well as the baseline of 94.7 percent for the last pre-pandemic school year.
While states generally allow parents to exempt their children from recommended childhood vaccines — usually on religious grounds or for medical reasons — exemption requests have historically been extremely low.
That’s changing. The CDC is reporting the highest U.S. exemption rate ever recorded. Even small immunization declines can lead to disease outbreaks.
A recent CDC report found that in 10 states (Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah and Wisconsin) more than 5 percent of children entering kindergarten were granted vaccine exemptions. In Idaho, the rate was 12 percent. “This is quite a jump,” the author of the CDC report, Ranee Seither, told NBC News. “Just three years ago, only two states had an exemption rate of more than 5%.”
“It’s becoming much more challenging for me to convince people to get their kids vaccinated,” warns Dr. Jason Terk, a Texas pediatrician in an Association of American Medical Colleges article.“We will become reacquainted with some of these diseases that we thought were relegated to history.”
While there has always been some level of vaccine skepticism, the remarkable success of many of the recommended vaccines in largely eliminating certain diseases, especially in children, tempered some of that skepticism. But COVID-19 changed all that.
Recall that six weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden expressed his COVID-19 vaccine doubts, “I trust vaccines. I trust scientists. But I don’t trust Donald Trump. And at this point, the American people can’t, either.” The Associated Press reported, “Should they attack Trump’s vaccine claims too aggressively, Democrats risk further undermining public confidence in a possible lifesaving medicine while looking as though they are rooting against a potential cure.”
Once Biden won the election, he and Democrats flipped. No longer was it the “Trump vaccine,” as the Biden administration shifted from skepticism to a vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 or more employees and later all federal employees, including the military.
President Biden and other prominent politicians then oversold the benefits of the COVID vaccines. The president promised Americans “you’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations” — a pledge that was patently untrue, given the nature of the virus and the emergence of breakthrough infections when he made the claim. Promises made, promises broken.
Mandates and broken promises helped undermine public trust not just in the COVID shots, but of vaccines generally. Pew Research measured a significant jump in vaccine hesitancy across the political spectrum, as the share of Americans supporting MMR requirements for children decreased 12 percentage points from 2019 through 2023. Yet vaccines for early childhood diseases remain some of the safest and most effective medicines ever invented.
Reasonable people can have questions about the COVID-19 vaccines, and be critical of the policies and often arrogant condescension of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and still support routine vaccines for children.
For instance, Ben Shapiro, a major conservative voice, is highly skeptical of COVID-19 vaccines for children. And yet he believes in the efficacy of standard childhood vaccines. “I have kids who are 7, 5, and 1. I get the case for vaccinating — I’m extremely pro-vaccination generally,” he said on X (Twitter).
American pediatricians have been using the MMR vaccine for more than 50 years. The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was first combined in 1971, and a new combination that immunizes against chickenpox (varicella), called MMRV, first became available in 2005.
The president deserves some of the blame for Americans’ increasing skepticism of vaccines. You can’t be a vaccine skeptic before an election and a vaccine hawk afterwards and not raise doubts among the public. Because of the administration’s flip-flops and overreach in combating COVID, we may be seeing needless outbreaks of several children’s diseases.
Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow him on X@MerrillMatthews.