Parents of incoming kindergartners are opting out of vaccines in record numbers, even as measles surges to levels not seen in decades. New CDC data show 4.2% of US kindergartners—about 155,000 children—received exemptions from school vaccine rules for 2025-26, up from 3.6% the year before and the highest on record. Most of the rise is driven by nonmedical exemptions, now topping 5% in 24 states, the Washington Post reports. As exemptions climb, coverage slips: MMR vaccination is at 92.4%, down from 95% before the pandemic, the threshold generally seen as adequate to prevent outbreaks. Roughly 280,000 kindergartners lack documentation of the full MMR series.
The numbers land a week after President Trump signed an executive order to call for breaking up the long-standard combined MMR shot into three separate vaccines and stretch out the childhood schedule—moves that contradict guidance from the CDC and major medical groups and that a Republican senator blasted. "The root cause of this is primarily because there's so much chaos and confusion in vaccination recommendation systems in the last year or so," said Dr. James Campbell, of the American Academy of Pediatrics, per the AP. The US has already logged 2,566 measles cases this year, 93% of them in people unvaccinated or with unknown status, even as the agency publicly limits itself to urging parents to talk with their doctors about vaccinations.
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