And it doesn’t involve sports, illiteracy or obesity:
More than half the states in America have seen a decline over the past decade in the take-up rates among kindergarten children of vaccines against diseases such as measles, mumps, hepatitis B and polio, as unfounded anti-vaccination theories have spread.
A new study by Health Testing Centers has found between 2009 and 2018 27 of the 50 US states experienced a drop in the percentage of vaccinated kindergarten-age children. In Georgia and Arkansas, the decline was more than 6%.
The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR), which is the focus of much activity by the so-called anti-vaxxer movement, is especially vulnerable. Alarmingly, the study finds that more than half of the states – 26 in total – have vaccination rates that have fallen below the target of 95% which experts state is needed to provide maximum protection against the diseases.
Three states – Colorado (88.7%), Kansas (89.1%) and Idaho (89.5%) – have rates that have fallen below the 90% that scientists say renders populations particularly vulnerable to a measles outbreak.
[…] Mississippi stands at the top of the league table for MMR, with 99.4% of its kindergartners vaccinated.
States other than Mississippi can send their thank you cards and other plaudits to Robert Kennedy Jr and some crank named Larry Cook, cc Mark Zuckerberg, since Kennedy and Cook have purchased the majority of the anti-vaxx ads on Facebook, which, of course, accepts them since they have no corporate policy other than the creation and maintenance of stupidity among users of their shitty app.
Baud
Mississippi should put a vaccine on their state flag. Good on them.
Baud
Oh, and antivax did start as a legitimate both sides outrage, but I believe recently Dem legislators have been taking the lead on fighting back, while the GOP is going after the antivax vote.
Wag
Nicely done, Mississippi! Keep up the good work. And I’m sorely disappointed in my own state. Colorado can do better.
And can I say how happy I am not to have to type my nym and email with every comment?
Jeffro
Dang it…I like Colorado a lot and was thinking about moving there when it’s time to retire…
mistermix loves your ass
@Jeffro: I was in Colorado a couple of times this year and it has really grown. Someone told me 100K new residents in the Front Range alone in the last year. Lots of them from California, which might explain the anti-vaxx nonsense.
Jeffro
@mistermix loves your ass: It seems like it’s been booming for at least the past decade.
Ah well…just one of many factors to consider, and plenty of time to do it.
Roger Moore
@mistermix loves your ass:
Before blaming California for being anti-vax, it might be good to look at what we’ve been doing. California has substantially boosted its vaccination rates by eliminating personal belief exemptions, and we just passed a new law that cracks down on doctors giving out frivolous medical necessity exemptions.
Obvious Russian Troll
@mistermix loves your ass: Anti-vaxx has caught on among the right. For instance, anti-vaxx propaganda has started to blame transgender people on vaccines and suggest that vaccines contain aborted fetuses.
debbie
Test worked.
Ruckus
@mistermix loves your ass: Here’s the government info from the CDC. CA is pretty decent, 96.5% many states are far, far worse. Alabama is 90.6% CO you mentioned – CA’s # of students is almost 9 times that of CO Idaho is 89.5% Kansas is 90.8% New Hampshire is 91.8% Ohio is 91.6% Everyone else is above those.
Nicole
Well, good on Mississippi, and just in time for flu season. I had a conversation yesterday with a woman who is 34 weeks pregnant, who complained about her doctors trying to persuade her to get the flu vaccine while pregnant (note: it’s very safe to do so). She vented about those pharmaceutical companies just pushing doctors to do it for the profit, and was not happy when I told her in fact, pharmaceutical companies don’t make a whole lot of money off of vaccines. I also explained that the reason the government runs the vaccine injury court is because pharmaceutical companies were threatening to stop making vaccines and this was how the gov’t was able to persuade them to keep making them. I could see she really, really didn’t want to believe me.
Well off, white, educated. I swear; I don’t know what happens to some people’s brains that they buy into the anti-vaccine hysteria. It’s crazy. I have family members, with advanced degrees, that went that way when they had kids (though I think they’ve mostly come around since).I only wish I had remembered what Cole once said about vaccines- that the proof we have that they work is that insurance companies are very happy to pay for them, and they sure as shit aren’t going to pay for anything they don’t think will save them money.
I had to get a measles booster this spring because my titer test came back negative. Gen-Xers, it’s worth getting tested. My husband also had to get a booster, and we grew up in totally different parts of the country. I’m pretty confident I was vaccinated twice as a kid, too.
WereBear
The doctor who faked the study had his license taken away. That should always be the SECOND thing in any article on the subject. The third thing is discussing kids who were killed or severely compromised by measles. Myself, I point out that every then-state used to have special schools for all the blind-deaf children who were rather common before vaccination. And these were the ones who lived.
Tenar Arha
I’m old enough that I probably had separate vaccines for measles, mumps, & rubella. Anyway, I read either here or somewhere else those versions were not always so effective/long lasting? Last physical I had my doctor test me for those immunities, turns out I only had borderline rubella protection. To get a rubella booster, I had to get the full MMR to update my immunities.
FYI my insurance would only cover the shots at the doctor’s office, I couldn’t get them myself at the CVS like a flu shot. But based on these statistics, the extra aggravation was totally worth it.
debbie
@Ruckus:
Sigh. Shame on Ohio.
chopper
@Roger Moore:
i think that’s what mix is talking about. CA has tightened up requirements so a bunch of anti-vax assholes decided to move to colorado instead.
WereBear
@chopper: I’m sure Idaho is just slavering to be the New Frontier.
But I have seen Deadwood, and don’t even want to visit.
Brachiator
Well, I guess the people in Colorado can at least smoke weed to help them forget how stupid they are with respect to vaccines.
This is really sad. I hope that we never have to deal with a large scale outbreak of measles in these states.
Ruckus
@debbie:
Read the CDC report.
Some of the states did voluntary reporting and that skews the %.
@WereBear:
I’m old enough that everyone I knew in school had all the “normal” childhood diseases. There were lots of follow on issues for lots of kids. I had encephalitis from the measles, had to go to docs, be treated and tested for years. And yes kids died from the diseases. I knew 3 people with polio, now I know a 4th. Went to school with a girl in my class with it. 2 of my friends moms were the others.
JPL
@Tenar Arha: I got the booster at CVS and since I wanted to see my grandson before he was vaccinated, it was worth it.
JPL
GA has three new cases of measles in near by Cobb county. The quarantined one family. When I was young, I remembered houses with signs on them.
frosty
I’m so old I remember bumper stickers that said “Don’t Californicate Colorado” From the 70s IIRC.
WereBear
It was a point of pride for my mother that “all you kids got your shots!”
Nicole
@Tenar Arha: The MMR has improved since the 1960s-1970s, and yeah, a lot of us who got it back then may need a booster.
The MMR is the only one my doctor made me sit in the office for 15 minutes after, I guess because some folk can have a reaction to it? That’s probably one reason they don’t want to offer them at the local CVS.
SWMBO
@Nicole: Florida had a new rule for adults going back to college that you must have a measles vaccine or a titer test to go to school (this was years ago). I couldn’t prove I had had the measles as a child so they told me to go to the county health department and get the measles vaccine for free. HOURS later, I started getting hives at the injection site that radiated out. I had hard chills and started wheezing (asthma). I took a couple of benadryl every few hours after that to get it under control. Not fun at all. I have not had any vaccines since because three doctors I had seen at the time told me that I could have been having a reaction to the media that the vaccine was grown in (one of the doctors was my allergist.) I am assuming an abundance of caution but still….
SWMBO
@WereBear: My kids got all their shots on schedule or just a few months off. They didn’t get the chicken pox vaccine because they had chicken pox before the vaccine came out.
In my family, my dad’s next youngest sister died at 4 yo with pneumonia and measles. My mother’s next younger brother died at 1 month old from the same. People need to walk through a graveyard and look at the headstones. A lot of kids died before they were 10 from these preventable diseases.
I went through a phase of believing that vaccines cause autism because my son was on the autism spectrum and I really wanted something external to blame for it. I am firmly in the vaccinate your kids! camp now.
Shalimar
Also #1 in breaking Alabama quarterbacks.
Ruckus
@WereBear:
My mom as well. It’s just that I was born before the vaccinations. I was 4 or so when the first polio vaccine was released. The entire family stood in line at a bank waiting for our sugar cube, with scores of other families. All the other “childhood” diseases vaccines didn’t come out till after everyone I knew had the diseases. And as I said one girl had polio and grew up with it. That 4th person with polio, she lives in my building, in a wheelchair. She can still walk but apparently that is rather difficult.
waratah
My sister in Australia had the flue shot and still got the flue near the end of the winter. She said that if she had not had the shot she thinks it would have killed her it was so bad. I think the flue migrates from that area to here so I made sure I got mine. She did not feel until her third week and lost a lot of weight.
Ruckus
@SWMBO:
I had a cousin who died at 6 months old. His mother died less than 2 yrs later from congenital heart disease, the same thing that killed her father, my grandfather. I’ve never found out the cause of my cousin’s death but I do know that 60-70 yrs ago it was not uncommon for infants or even young children to die of all sorts of health issues that today’s healthcare can quite often fix. Medicine has evolved immensely in the last 60 yrs. Infants live, old farts live, we have replacement joints, cancer treatments. 20 yrs ago my cancer treatment would have been far worse and far less likely to actually work. The type of machine I laid in for 20 minutes every day for 9 weeks didn’t exist 20 yrs ago, now it’s commonplace.
JPL
@Nicole: I got the booster at CVS several months ago. I did have to pay out of pocket though.
JPL
@waratah: The shot is most effective for the first three or so months.
CaseyL
I’m not real clear on my childhood vaccination record: I never, ever got any of the childhood diseases, but can’t remember if that’s because the vaccine(s) existed or because they didn’t yet, and so Mom sent me to measles- and chicken-pox parties. (A vaguely remembered joke from my childhood was that Mom sent me to them but I didn’t catch anything, she did.)
Washington State recently had a major outbreak of measles, thanks to those fucking anti-vaxxers. So, not being clear on my history, and working as I do on a college campus, I went off to get the MMR “just in case.” I had no reaction to the shot at all.
Afterward, I remembered that I had gotten an MMR about 10+ years ago, and did have a very strong reaction then – felt like I had a bad flu for a couple of days. Still, never hurts to boost one’s immunity – to protect oneself, and everyone else!
…and, yahoo, the site remembers who I am!
Cermet
Mississippi has done what is very smart – NO expections except for proven medical issues. They knew what they were doing.
Matt
Nevermind antivax ads, we should be running “What THEY don’t want YOU to KNOW: breathing car exhaust gives you superpowers! Get into the garage and start the car!” ads.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@debbie:
Are you familiar with Ohio State Rep Don Manning?
Searcher
I had a thirty-something-year-old cousin die of the flu last year, left behind three kids. No illness should be risked frivolously.
Fun fact I learned the other day, measles attacks immune cells, including specifically the immune cells that are tied to your immune systems ability to “remember” and fight against past viruses, killing large numbers (like 70%) of them, leaving you vulnerable to re-infection by other diseases.
So far from the immunity gained from exposure to the illness being somehow “better” than vaccination (which is already crazy), you end a measles infection with less immunity than you start with.
debbie
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Not until I just googled him. Between vax exemptions and infrastructure made safe from foreigners, he sounds horrible!
Raven
Well they are playing #1 right now and it ain’t pretty!