JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Childhood vaccines are once again under debate in the United States. Over the next two days, an advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will consider changing the vaccine recommendations for children. That includes delaying the hepatitis B vaccine, which is given at birth. Committee members were picked by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned the safety of vaccines. And this is happening as childhood vaccination rates are declining and preventable diseases like measles are on the rise. NPR's Maria Godoy is here now. Hi.
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Hi.
SUMMERS: Maria, just start by telling us - what do vaccination rates look like in the U.S.?
GODOY: Well, you know, we're definitely backsliding. On the one hand, most kids are still getting vaccinated, but those rates have been falling for years. For example, CDC data shows nationwide vaccination rates against measles have fallen to just over 92%, which is below the 95% threshold needed to protect against community outbreaks. In some states, it's much lower. For instance, in Idaho, it's under 80%. And even states with higher statewide vaccination rates have pockets of low vaccination that put them at risk of an outbreak. I spoke with pediatrician Peter Hotez. He's a vaccine researcher with Baylor College of Medicine.
PETER HOTEZ: I believe we've passed an inflection point. We've already now started a pretty steep decline in vaccine acceptance in the United States.
GODOY: He says when you drill down to the county level, 77% of U.S. counties have seen a decline in vaccination rates since 2019. He called that a red flag.
SUMMERS: Well, what does this mean for childhood diseases like measles, for example?
GODOY: Well, we're already seeing the impact. The U.S. had a huge measles outbreak in Texas earlier this year that spread to other states. Hotez and other infectious disease experts think the U.S. is likely to lose its measles elimination status within the next couple of years. That means measles has been continuously transmitted within a region for a 12-month period.
SUMMERS: Maria, it seems to me that we focus an awful lot on measles. Why is that?
GODOY: You know, it's really the canary in the coal mine of infectious diseases. Because it's so, so very contagious, it's usually the first vaccine-preventable disease that comes back. So it shows us where we have gaps in our public health system. And measles is a serious disease. Before vaccination became widespread in the 1960s, some 4- to 500 people died each year in this country from measles. And while most kids will recover, some can have serious lasting consequences, including deafness and blindness.
And we are also seeing other vaccine-preventable diseases return. Pertussis - so whooping cough - is making a comeback. This year, three infants died of the disease in Kentucky. None of them were vaccinated. And two others died in Louisiana. And there are concerns that other diseases that we don't worry about today, like rubella or even polio, could potentially return. Here's Hotez again.
HOTEZ: So we've already now, you know, have maybe lost the battle on measles and pertussis, and the others will likely follow.
GODOY: You know, at least in places where vaccination rates have plummeted.
SUMMERS: What are you hearing from pediatricians?
GODOY: So the doctors I spoke to are worried that the messaging from this administration is making things worse. Just recently, the CDC, under the direction of Secretary Kennedy, changed its website to say, quote, "the claim that vaccines do not cause autism is not evidence-based" when, in fact, there's a large body of research debunking any such link. Dr. Sean O'Leary with the American Academy of Pediatrics said, changes like this are scaring parents. And he worried that more of them will refuse vaccines for their kids who will then suffer from diseases when they don't need to.
SUMMERS: NPR's Maria Godoy, thanks.
GODOY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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