‘Vaccines keep our children healthy’: Bay Area issues urgent back-to-school warning
With the school year fast approaching and the United States grappling with its worst measles outbreak in more than three decades, Bay Area public health officials urged families on Thursday to make childhood vaccinations a top priority.
Their warning comes amid a surge of vaccine misinformation and a troubling decline in immunization coverage.
“Vaccines keep our children healthy so they can learn and thrive at school,” Dr. Susan Philip, San Francisco’s Health Officer, said in a statement. “Diseases such as measles, whooping cough, and polio are preventable thanks to vaccines that have been proven to be safe and effective.”
Health officers from 12 Bay Area counties and the City of Berkeley issued a joint statement Thursday, urging parents to schedule well-child visits and ensure their children are up to date on vaccinations ahead of the academic year.
California law requires immunizations for students attending both public and private schools, as well as early childhood programs.
As of this week, the U.S. has reported 1,319 measles cases, surpassing 2019’s total, and is now at risk of losing its measles elimination status. Fourteen states, including California, are battling outbreaks. The largest began in under-vaccinated communities in Texas.
Public schools nationwide require two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine before kindergarten, yet non-medical exemptions reached a record high during the 2023–2024 school year.
Santa Clara County Acting Health Officer Dr. Sarah Rudman emphasized the stakes for Bay Area families.
“We need to ensure the current generation of students – regardless of race, ZIP code, or income – has the same opportunity to grow up healthy and safe,” she said.
Families can check their child’s status using California’s Digital Vaccine Record system.
Health officials say vaccine skepticism – amplified by social media and shifts in federal policy – has significantly hindered immunization efforts. Although measles was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, recent developments threaten to unravel that progress.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, has drawn criticism for undermining vaccine confidence and slashing funding to global immunization programs.
“Drastic cuts in aid, coupled with misinformation about the safety of vaccines, threaten to unwind decades of progress,” warned WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week.
A recent U.N. report found that over 14 million children missed routine immunizations in 2024.
It also remains unclear whether COVID-19 vaccines will be available to children this fall. In May, Kennedy announced they were no longer recommended for healthy children or pregnant women, bypassing the usual process led by scientific experts.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that just 92.7% of U.S. kindergarteners are vaccinated against measles, below the 95% community-level threshold needed to prevent outbreaks.
“What we’re seeing with measles is a little bit of a ‘canary in a coal mine,'” Lauren Gardner, who leads Johns Hopkins University’s independent measles and COVID-19 tracking efforts, told the Associated Press this week.”It’s indicative of a problem that we know exists with vaccination attitudes in this country and just, I think, likely to get worse.”
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