A brand new county-level dataset from Johns Hopkins College researchers reveals a nationwide decline within the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination price amongst U.S. youngsters for the reason that begin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Out of two,066 studied counties, 1,614 counties, 78%, reported drops in vaccinations and the typical county-level vaccination price fell 93.92% pre-pandemic to 91.26% post-pandemic-an common decline of two.67%, transferring additional away from the 95% herd immunity threshold to foretell or restrict the unfold of measles.
Solely 4 of the 33 states in studied-California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York-reported a rise within the median county-level vaccination price.
The info is revealed in the present day in JAMA.
The info is launched as multiple thousand measles instances have been reported this 12 months in the USA. Except 2019, that is essentially the most instances reported within the U.S. in a single 12 months in over three a long time, with the overwhelming majority of instances occurring in unvaccinated youngsters.
“This open, excessive decision dataset offers a crucial useful resource to discover and higher perceive the nation’s vaccination panorama and its implications for the danger of measles unfold,” stated senior writer Lauren Gardner, director of Johns Hopkins College’s Heart for Methods Science and Engineering, an skilled in utilizing information and modeling to raised perceive the unfold of illness. This work attracts on her expertise main the information assortment efforts behind the Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 dashboard that was relied upon globally through the pandemic.
Gardner created Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 dashboard that was relied upon globally to trace instances through the pandemic.
The county-level vaccination information enhances the state and national-level from the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, confirming a widespread decline in MMR vaccination charges within the U.S. following the COVID-19 pandemic, whereas additionally revealing the numerous heterogeneity of vaccination patterns inside and throughout states.
The crew collected county-level 2-dose MMR vaccination charges for kindergarteners from every state’s division of well being web site from 2017 to 2024, the place out there. The dataset consists of a minimum of one 12 months of vaccination information for two,237 counties throughout 38 states.
