Are parents who refuse to vaccinate kids for COVID fueling another unhealthy trend in Florida? | Editorial

While the country is divided over COVID-19 vaccines — and Florida lawmakers plan to pass laws to undermine federal mandates — another ominous problem is going largely unnoticed: Routine immunizations for children, required under state law for school attendance, have fallen during the pandemic.

That means fewer children immunized for diseases such as measles, polio and mumps, which have been controlled or eradicated because of vaccine mandates — the boogeyman that has ignited school board protests and angry Facebook posts, driving Republicans across the nation to pass laws to make them more difficult for COVID-19.

Miami-Dade County has always struggled to get kids vaccinated because of its transient population and families from around the world who aren’t familiar with Florida’s vaccination schedule, according to Dr. Lisa Gwynn, a pediatrician with the University of Miami and president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Even before the pandemic, the county fell below the state’s goal for 95% of kindergarten students receiving all doses of all vaccines required for school entry or attendance.

In the 2020-21 school year, vaccinations among Miami-Dade kindergartners in public and private schools fell from 93.4% the previous year to 92.9%. The biggest drop occurred among seventh-graders receiving their booster shots: 95.3% to 89.2%.

Florida overall saw a similar decline, with vaccinations among seventh-graders hitting its lowest level since 2009-10, though at 94.5% it still beats Miami-Dade’s. Among kindergartners, the state’s 93.3% rate is the lowest in seven years, according to a Florida Department of Health report.

Quarantine concerns

The likely reasons behind this decline are parents skipping trips to their pediatrician because of fear of catching the coronavirus and students’ transition to virtual learning last academic year, according to Miami-Dade County Public Schools. Medical providers also had a limited number of appointments. Florida’s stay-at-home order early in the pandemic didn’t help. To catch up, the district has partnered with UM’s mobile pediatric clinic to offer free vaccines at different schools.

As life returns to normal, and kids are back on campus, the expectation, and hope, is that they will meet their immunization schedule. But school districts and health departments must also prepare for the anti-vaxx sentiment that has started to creep into these long-standing routine vaccinations. More parents are picking and choosing which vaccines they give their children, and when, and others are deciding to forego them all together, Gwynn told the Herald Editorial Board. She has even seen parents of babies in newborn intensive care unit turning down shots.

Most of the pushback is coming from affluent, educated and politically engaged parents, not low-income and migrant families who often lack access to care and information, she said.

“Never before have doctors been so challenged about vaccines,” Gwynn said,

All of that in the name of “parental choice” — and often based on bogus information parents have found on social media and the internet. Still persistent is the myth about MMR vaccines (measles, mumps and rubella) causing autism. A hyped-up 1998 paper making that connection was retracted and later found to be based on falsified data about patients’ medical histories, according to the medical journal BMJ.

Leaders fuel fears

The anti-vaxx movement and vaccine hesitancy are not a new phenomenon. Even before the pandemic, the use of religious exemptions for school immunizations in Florida was on an upward trend among seventh-graders, reaching its highest level this academic year, according to DOH data.

But never before have leaders at the highest levels of government and the Republican Party openly fueled anti-vaccine sentiment. For example, Florida’s top doctor, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, gave a speech this month casting doubt on the COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy and safety.

Did they not expect that fear-mongering could spill over to long-established vaccines such as diseases as measles, rubella and polio — a paralyzing disease once so feared that parents wouldn’t let their children outside to play?

State Sen. Manny Diaz Jr., R-Hialeah, told Florida Politics in September that it might be time to “review” school vaccination requirements. Chastened after a firestorm of criticism, he walked those comments back. Diaz said in a statement to the Herald Editorial Board on Wednesday, “I do not intend to change or review current vaccination statutes.”

Phew! It looks like our school immunization requirements are safe — at least for now. On the other hand, Florida lawmakers will do anything within their power to undermine President Biden’s plan to increase COVID-19 vaccinations through employer mandates — which appears to be our only way to immunize more Americans before another highly contagious variant takes hold.

Diaz, the chair of the Senate Health Policy Committee, vowed to “stand on the side of freedom” against “any NEW government mandated vaccinations, including COVID-19 vaccines.”

Imagine if our lawmakers worked instead to boost our local health departments, which have been running on shoestring budgets for years, and to push parents to stay up to date on their children’s immunizations.

Dare we say? Imagine if our elected officials worked to promote more COVID-19 vaccinations. We can only dream.

This story was originally published October 30, 2021 at 8:47 AM.