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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah experienced an increase in school vaccine waivers for kindergartners starting public school last year for the first time in three school years.
"We should acknowledge that there was a marked increase in kindergarten vaccine exemptions and a drop in appropriate vaccine coverage for kindergartens in our state," said Rich Lakin, director of immunizations for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services.
While it has gone up, Lakin said it hasn't risen by an "alarming" amount.
According to data obtained by KSL.com, the state average for vaccine exemptions over the last five school years was around 5.3%. During the 2021-22 school year, this rose to 5.9% — a 0.6 percentage point increase from the average.
"A half a percent is really not something that's alarming," Lakin said.
Additionally, he said it's important to remember that many schools — especially ones in rural areas — have a small number of total kindergarten students enrolled.
"If there's just one or two exemptions that increase, that could show a large percentage (increase)," Lakin said. "We have to be very careful when we analyze that data."
Even with all this under consideration, vaccine exemptions still rose in all 13 of Utah's health districts.
Why?
We might have to wait until the 2022-23 vaccine waiver data is released to get a better understanding, Lakin said.
"2021 school years were abnormal in several ways, and this time may be reflected in the school vaccine exemption data that we received," he said.
Lakin noted that with fewer students in classrooms, parents may have been less likely to seek vaccine exemptions, potentially leading to the uptick in exemptions that occurred when students returned to school.
"I think the 2022 school year will, hopefully, give us some better data since we're kind of back to a normal school year in what we're seeing in our exemptions," Lakin said. "That will probably help us look and see if, during the pandemic, it was more of a disturbance in the exemptions than a possible trend."
Every school in Utah is required to report its exemption data to the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. The data takes some time to sort through and organize and the latest data from the 2022-23 school year probably won't be ready until January or February.
If vaccine exemptions continue to climb after a more extended return to normalcy, "then we know we've got something, that maybe parents are looking at the (vaccine) misinformation that's out there and adhering to that more than credible sources," Lakin said.
Vaccine exemptions continuing to climb could also carry straightforward, yet unwelcome, consequences.
"Then we just have more outbreaks of measles and mumps," he said. "Ten years ago, we hardly ever saw any measles or mumps outbreaks and then you saw the outbreak in Disneyland, you saw outbreaks of measles and mump cases in Utah."
"There's a close correlation to the amount of people that are vaccinated and the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases. If you have higher exemptions, you're going to have more cases of vaccine-preventable diseases," Lakin said.
