Anti-vaccine, pro-disease advocates working hard to bring outbreaks to Idaho | Opinion

The percentage of U.S. kindergartners whose parents are opting them out of state-required childhood vaccinations rose to the highest level in history during the 2022-23 school year, according to federal data released Thursday, as reported by The Washington Post.

Some states are worse than others. We’ll give you one guess which state is the worst.

Yep, Idaho.

In all, 12.1% of kindergarten families in Idaho received some sort of an exemption from a vaccine, the highest percentage in the nation by far.

Nationally, the exemption rate is 3%, according to the data, which is up from the previous year and the highest level ever.

Only 81.3% of Idaho kindergartners were reported to have received both doses of the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine to start the 2022-23 school year, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That’s also the worst in the nation, far below the overall national rate of 93.1%.

You know how we always say, “At least Mississippi is worse”? We can’t say that this time around. Mississippi puts Idaho to shame, with a 98.4% vaccination rate.

This is serious business.

Measles is particularly contagious and dangerous. It can cause serious complications, such as pneumonia, swelling of the brain (encephalitis) and death.

A measles outbreak last fall in Columbus, Ohio, infected 82 children, most of whom were old enough to get the shots but whose parents chose not to have them vaccinated, health officials said.

With nearly 20% of kindergartners in Idaho not vaccinated against measles, “that is a wildfire waiting to happen,” Kelly Moore, chief executive of Immunize.org, a nonprofit advocacy group previously called the Immunization Action Coalition, told The Washington Post.

Idaho is one of only 10 states in the country with an exemption rate of higher than 5%.

That 5% benchmark is important because, according to the CDC’s doctors and scientists, exemptions exceeding 5% limit the level of achievable vaccination coverage, which increases the risk for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases.

We’ve already had a small taste of what to expect. Southwest Idaho experienced an outbreak of measles last month, according to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. It was only 10 cases, and we’re fortunate it wasn’t worse.

Idaho’s outbreak started when an unvaccinated, nonimmune person traveled to a country where there was an ongoing outbreak of measles. The person was exposed there and started having symptoms after returning to Idaho, according to Health and Welfare. Several unvaccinated children were exposed to the first case in a household setting, and nine became ill with the measles.

Measles stopped being continuously spread in the United States in 2000, and only two cases had been reported in Idaho during the past 20 years, both in 2019, according Health and Welfare.

But here we are, in 2023, having to battle outbreaks of diseases this country’s, and state’s, previous generations worked hard to eradicate. We’re supposed to be advancing as a society, not regressing.

Compare Idaho’s measles immunization rates with those of other countries, too. Of course, developed nations, such as Australia, France, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan and others, all have immunization rates in the 90s.

Our neighbor to the south, Mexico, has a 99% measles immunization rate.

Even countries such as Albania, Jamaica, Morocco, Namibia and Rwanda have higher measles immunization rates than Idaho.

And if you think it affects only you, think again.

Babies typically don’t get the measles vaccine until they turn 1, so they’re vulnerable to the disease, and they’re in an age group most likely to develop complications, including brain swelling that can cause seizures, permanent deafness, intellectual disability, brain and lung damage, even death.

Pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems, such as from leukemia or HIV infection, are also susceptible to complications from measles.

It’s not just the measles vaccine that Idahoans are opting out of either.

The percentage of Idaho kindergartners vaccinated against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and varicella is equally low, all around 81%.

Idaho has the most lax allowances to receive a vaccination exemption, allowing for not only medical or religious beliefs, but also simply for personal beliefs.

In other words, just because.

A total of 45 states and Washington, D.C., grant exemptions for people who have religious objections to immunizations, but only 15 states allow exemptions for children whose parents object to immunizations because of personal, moral or other beliefs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The Idaho Statesman reported in 2020 that “California refugees” were moving to Idaho because it was so easy to get a vaccine exemption and still send your children to public schools.

In the three years since that article was published, we’re seeing that trend play out.

According to the CDC, the increase in Idaho’s exemption rate ticked up 2.3% from 2021 to 2022, the second-highest increase in the country.

It seems preposterous that today, in 2023, we’re talking about one-fifth of the kindergarten population not getting vaccinated.

The COVID pandemic and the continued suspicion of mRNA vaccines have only exacerbated unfounded fears of vaccinations in general.

It seems impossible now to appeal to anti-vaxxers, those who won’t get their children vaccinated based on false information, conspiracy theories and baseless fears.

And unfortunately, in Idaho, we have a state run by legislators who share those fears, conspiracy theories and misinformation, and each legislative session they try to make it easier, not more difficult, to spread dangerous, fatal diseases by opting out of vaccination requirements.

We call on all parents to get their children vaccinated, unless there is a medical reason why they can’t.

Barring that, we call on legislators to place greater restrictions on who can get an exemption from mandated vaccines.

Otherwise, Idaho is headed for outbreaks of preventable diseases we all thought we had long ago eradicated.

Statesman editorials are the unsigned opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members Mary Rohlfing and Patricia Nilsson.