{"id":371250,"date":"2026-07-13T16:04:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T16:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/371250\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T16:04:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T16:04:11","slug":"measles-vaccination-rates-for-kindergarteners-inch-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/371250\/","title":{"rendered":"Measles vaccination rates for kindergarteners inch up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>TEXAS \u2014 Last year, Texas saw one of the <a href=\"https:\/\/spectrumlocalnews.com\/tx\/south-texas-el-paso\/news\/2025\/03\/14\/measles-cases-reach-nearly-300-total-in-texas-and-new-mexico--here-s-what-you-should-know\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">largest measles outbreaks<\/a> in 25 years. Two children in West Texas died and nearly 100 people were hospitalized.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had a whole generation of pediatricians up until a few years ago who never saw a case of the measles,\u201d said Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, the chief of infectious diseases at Children\u2019s Health.<\/p>\n<p>After the COVID pandemic, vaccine rates fluctuated for the first time in years. Then, the state made vaccine exemption forms downloadable and printable, increasing the access families have to reject vaccines.<\/p>\n<p>Over 2,200 cases of measles spread across the country last year, including 762 in Texas.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat\u2019s probably remarkable is we\u2019re seeing measles now at rates we haven\u2019t seen in 25 years,\u201d said Kahn.<\/p>\n<p>Now, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, vaccine rates are up for kindergartners from 93.2% to 93.3%.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe increase in the measles vaccine rate has been relatively modest,\u201d said Kahn.<\/p>\n<p>Despite a small uptick this past school year, state records obtained by Spectrum News show measles vaccine rates are still not where they were prior to the COVID pandemic at nearly 97%.<\/p>\n<p>It is still lower than a few years ago when rates averaged approximately 94% to 95% between 2020 and 2024.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you step back and look at a little bigger picture, the vaccine rates are still well below where they were before the COVID pandemic. So we certainly still have a lot of catching up to do,\u201d said Kahn.<\/p>\n<p>Measles cases are catching up too. Currently, there are 2,170 confirmed cases across the U.S., including at least 182 cases in Texas. The country is on track to double last year\u2019s case count.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is all fairly predictable, and I think if things don\u2019t change dramatically, then we\u2019re going to continue to see more and more measles cases,\u201d said Kahn.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Kahn hopes this year\u2019s 0.1% increase might be a first sign that the rates are changing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think people start to look at that and say well wait a minute this could be a bad disease or they read something in the newspaper\u2026and they\u2019re realizing maybe we should think about this vaccine a little bit more seriously,\u201d said Kahn.<\/p>\n<p>State data also shows conscientious exemptions among kindergartners also increased this past school year by 0.87%.<\/p>\n<p>Seventh graders saw an over 3.5% decline in measles vaccine rates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TEXAS \u2014 Last year, Texas saw one of the largest measles outbreaks in 25 years. Two children in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2271,2160,132,1570,102,584,25523,56,11586,223,82,27,29,28,1569,2053,835],"class_list":["post-371250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-app-health","tag-app-top-stories","tag-austin","tag-ctv","tag-dallas","tag-health","tag-health-and-medicine","tag-houston","tag-lauren-rangel","tag-news","tag-san-antonio","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-texas-what-you-need-to-know","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}