Kindergarten Vaccine Opt-Outs Hit a Record High

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
This is WNYC, FM, HD, and AM New York.

**Brian Lehrer** (0:21)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll begin today with a two-part Health and Climate Tuesdays section of the show. Every Tuesday, we make sure to do at least one segment on climate or other public health issues so they don't get lost among the other seemingly more pressing or sensational headlines each day. Today, we'll do both. Later this hour, the Queensborough president, Donovan Richards, on the increasingly frequent flooding inside many homes in the borough because of the increasingly intense downpours that the warming climate has been bringing. That's coming up. But we begin with more developments, in the last few days, in the Trump administration's remake of public health priorities and outcomes. In case you missed it, the Centers for Disease Control announced last week that there have been more cases of measles in the US so far this year than all of last year, about 2,800 so far this year compared to about 2,300 all of last year.
More than 90% of those cases appeared in people whose vaccination status, the CDC calls, unvaccinated or unknown, just 3% were in those they consider fully vaccinated. Two-thirds of the measles cases have been in Americans who are teenage or younger.
Seven percent or 193 people have wound up hospitalized with measles so far this year. The CDC records no measles deaths so far this year, three last year. Apparently related, the number of families using not to get their kindergarten kids vaccinated has risen with Donald Trump and RFK Jr. in office in the last year. The percentage of families opting out for what they call non-medical reasons jumped from 3.6 percent of kindergartners to 4.2 percent. Another way to look at that stat, it's a 17 percent increase in those exemptions, which would be the biggest one-year increase ever. What if this keeps going at another 17 percent, and another?
We may find out soon, because these stats about declining childhood vaccine rates and rising childhood measles rates come just as the new school year is beginning or about to begin in the US.
President Trump just nominated someone as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who was standing by his side for his recent executive order. Don't worry if you're concerned about these, they don't actually have the force of law. But an executive order that promoted fewer childhood vaccines and breaking the measles mumps and rubella vaccine into three separate shots. The nominee, Dr. Heidi Overton, has also favored making Medicaid abortion prescriptions harder to obtain, among other things. And interestingly, the New York Times reports that she did run afoul of the Trump and RFK linked so-called Make America Healthy Again movement by supporting the expanded use of the weed killer glycopate on the US food supply. We'll talk about all of this now with Julie Rovner, Chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News and host of their weekly podcast, What the Health? Previously, as some of you know, she was an NPR health policy correspondent. She is also the author of the reference book, Healthcare Politics and Policy A to Z, now in its third edition. Julie, always good of you to come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

**Julie Rovner** (3:56)
Always a pleasure to be here, Brian.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:58)
Let's start with the vaccine and measles news. Then we'll get to Heidi Overton. We'll play a clip of her explicitly calling for conservative medical research.
But on measles, there have already been more measles cases this year in the US than all last year. Is that simply because vaccine rates are down or is it more complicated than that?

**Julie Rovner** (4:17)
It's mostly because vaccine rates are down. In news breaking just this morning, the state of Pennsylvania's public health department is announcing two deaths from measles. The first two deaths in the US this year, both in Lancaster County, home to large Amish population, both unvaccinated, not clear if they were children or adults, it doesn't say.
But so much for the administration being able to say, well, nobody has died yet of measles this year. Well, now we know that at least two people have.
So yes, we are seeing way more measles than we have. As you pointed out, the CDC reported last week about kindergartners, that more parents are opting not to have their children vaccinated. And we know that basically in order to have what we call herd immunity, so that if one person gets measles, it doesn't start spreading wildly, you need about 95 percent of the population vaccinated. And in a lot of places that no longer exists in Idaho, for example, the entering kindergarten population is only about 75 percent vaccinated. So there are pockets of the country where the vaccine rate is very, very low. And that's one key reason why when we see a case of measles, which we always have, you know, occasionally, now we're seeing it spread. It used to be you could, you know, shut that down pretty quickly. Now, not so much.