Non-medical kindergarten vaccine exemptions hit record 4.2% as MMR coverage dips

Offit says at least 280,000 kindergarteners did not get MMR vaccine

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Aug. 22 that 92.4% of kindergarteners were vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella in the last school year, down 0.1% from the year before. The same data showed non-medical vaccination exemptions among kindergarteners rose 17% over the last school year, from 3.6% to 4.2% nationwide — the highest single-year increase ever.

The release follows an Aug. 10 event at which President Donald Trump, flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Heidi Overton, his nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, signed an executive order calling for the United States to reduce the number of diseases children are routinely vaccinated against from 17 to 11 and to administer the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine as three separate doses. In a three-sentence announcement, the CDC said “overall vaccination rates among kindergarteners remained high.” Medical experts quoted in the report immediately cited cause for concern in the trends.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the declines reached across the vaccine schedule. “There’s been a decrease in immunization rates in all vaccines. There’s a decrease in immunizations in more than half the states, as opposed to the year before,” he said. He added that at least 280,000 kindergarteners did not receive the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

Offit said: “If we had a secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) who was an actual secretary of HHS instead of an anti-vaccine activist and science denialist, he would stand up in front of the American public and say, ‘Vaccinate your children.’ – please, vaccinate your children.”

Pediatricians, local health officials and vaccine experts described the data as evidence of how the administration has sowed confusion about the safety and benefits of vaccines, leading to depressed vaccination rates and parents’ efforts to opt out. Not every community is losing ground. “In Cleveland, for example, a couple years ago, our percentage of kindergartners being up-to-date on vaccines was 68%. This past school year, we’re up to 76%. We are doing the work,” said Dr. David Margolius, director of the Cleveland Department of Public Health. “The federal government is causing more and more confusion, and that’s washing out the effects and the work that all of us are trying to do,” Margolius added.

The data also showed that the overwhelming majority of American parents still vaccinate their children. Parents who decline vaccination are not evenly distributed: low vaccination rates are often found in pockets, including in Idaho and Ohio. The United States is currently experiencing its worst year for measles since 1991, with hundreds of cases in Utah and South Carolina.

Widespread measles vaccination alone is credited with saving 59 million lives between 2000 and 2024, according to the World Health Organization. Before widespread US vaccination in the mid-20th century, measles killed roughly 500 people per year. Activists have long linked vaccines to autism; experts at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia note that autism has been linked to some infections, parental age and genetics, but that because it is a complex spectrum disorder, it is likely to have more than one cause.

At the Aug. 10 event, Trump linked vaccines to autism without evidence and said some injections look “like the size of a soda bottle,” assertions he said were supported by “gold standard” science. He described the rationale for splitting the MMR vaccine: “We have the MMR, which hopefully will be split up. We have the MMR, we want it in three separate vaccinations given at separate times.” “Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal, and separately it looks like they are not at all lethal,” he said. “You should have five separate visits for vaccines, rather than getting them all in the same day.”

Separating the shots would face practical barriers: drug companies have not produced separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines in decades, and doing so would require reengineering supply lines on some of their least profitable products. Legally, the federal government may recommend vaccines, but states set the requirements children must meet before attending public school — requirements that are arguably the most effective way to get children vaccinated.

Dr. Mysheika Roberts, commissioner of the public health department in Columbus, Ohio, said the MMR vaccine has long met a familiar first question. “The first concern with MMR is typically autism,” she said. Roberts was scheduled to serve on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices before Kennedy fired her in June 2025. The MMR vaccine has been targeted since 1998, when discredited former doctor Andrew Wakefield published studies in The Lancet linking the vaccine to autism; the studies fell apart under scrutiny and are now retracted. Investigative journalist Brian Deer later revealed that Wakefield had patented a measles vaccine months before his study was released, and that Wakefield had called for separating the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines.

Kennedy led the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense before becoming health secretary — an organization the report describes as one of the world’s most prolific spreaders of false and misleading vaccine claims. Nonprofit tax filings show his salary at the group was $325,056 in 2023, while he was on leave campaigning for president, and $510,515 in 2022. He also earned $1.5 million in “referral fees” from Wisner Baum and $62,500 from Morgan & Morgan, both law firms leading vaccine injury cases, according to ethics disclosures first published by Politico.

As health secretary, Kennedy has claimed the MMR vaccine contains “aborted fetal debris,” a claim the report says is false. During a 2025 measles outbreak in Texas, he recommended vitamin A supplementation, which the report says led to children being hospitalized for liver dysfunction. He also amended the CDC’s website to assert that the claim “vaccines do not cause autism” is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism; large population studies in multiple countries have examined the question and found no evidence linking vaccines to autism.

Kennedy disbanded the CDC’s group of expert advisors on vaccines and replaced them with a new group; the recommendations of that group are now the subject of litigation. Separately, changing federal recommendations have made it significantly harder to obtain certain vaccines, including for Covid-19, prompting a pregnant doctor to sue the Department of Health and Human Services because she could not obtain the Covid-19 shot.

Offit offered a broader assessment of Kennedy’s aims. “[Kennedy] is waging a war against vaccines because he believes … there is an epidemic of chronic diseases in this country. He believes vaccines are a major cause of that epidemic, and therefore he is going to do everything he can to lessen vaccines,” Offit said. “He said that when he runs into a parent holding a child on a hiking or walking path, he goes up to them and says, ‘Don’t vaccinate your child.’” “That’s who he is – a zealot – and that’s why he ignores the vaccine epidemic data,” Offit said.