Nearly half of the commonwealth’s public and private kindergarten classes fail to meet an important vaccination threshold, an analysis of state health data by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO shows.
By Kunle Falayi
The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO
Public and private schools in Virginia are required to report vaccination data to the State Department of Health at the start of every school year.
The reporting marks how many kindergartners in a class received a measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, shot.
Public health experts say the key number is 95% – the threshold for so-called “herd immunity” that chokes off the highly contagious virus before it can spread through a classroom or community.
“The more contagious a pathogen is, the higher the proportion of people in the population need to be immune to contain the spread of that infection," said Dr. Patrick Jackson, assistant professor of infectious diseases at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
The data from the Virginia Department of Health does not capture reporting from the state’s 56,000 homeschooled children. And Virginia is one of 44 states where religious exemption from vaccination is legal, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Parochial schools, as expected, account for the highest rates of religious exemptions.
The data represents a point in time. According to the Department of Health, vaccination rates in schools typically rise throughout the year as parents are encouraged to get their children inoculated.
For example, the database shows Newport News and Hampton public schools have kindergarten MMR vaccination rates below the herd immunity threshold. But a spokesperson for the Hampton & Peninsula Health Districts told VCIJ at WHRO in April that their public schools now meet or exceed the 95% threshold.
Norfolk’s kindergarten vaccination rate has similarly increased in the course of the school year, with 97.4% of the city’s kindergartners now inoculated against the virus, according to Dr. Susan Girois, who oversees the health department.
The database represents the vaccination survey data for kindergarten classes from over 1,370 schools. But it does not include the figures for the MMR coverage of some schools for privacy reasons. Those are schools with 10 or fewer kindergarten students.
Apart from the measles vaccination rate, the database shows the total number of kindergartners in each school along with the share of the students who opted for a religious or medical exemption.
Reach Kunle Falayi at kunle.falayi@vcij.org.