Health officials are concerned fewer children are current on their immunizations. And parents must rely on 2-year-old school vaccination data.
One of the concerned parents is Rebecca Mauldin, who will send her 4-year-old son to a private school that accepts only children who are up to date on immunizations unless they cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. He falls into that category after battling cancer and undergoing a liver transplant, she said.
His sister, who has no special health concerns, is a third-grader who started at the school last year after attending public school in Edmond for two years.
Mauldin said the number of nonmedical exemptions at the public school was too high and climbing. It was a big factor in moving her daughter, she said.
“I see what happens in other areas when the vaccination rate gets too low and there are outbreaks of chickenpox and measles,” Mauldin said.
Release of state data showing the percentage of Oklahoma kindergarteners who are up to date on all required vaccines was delayed due to the COVID-19 response, a spokesman for the Oklahoma State Department of Health said.
The state has submitted its data for 2019-20 to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for review, spokesman Rob Crissinger said. The CDC will release the data for all states in October or November, he said.
Most schools voluntarily report their vaccination and exemption data, but they aren’t required to fill out the kindergarten survey. About half of private schools don’t participate.
The Oklahoma City-County Health Department has immunized fewer children ahead of school this year, said LToya Knighten, chief of governmental affairs.
Two of its three clinics are temporarily closed due to the coronavirus, but health officials have offered after-hours immunizations on Thursday evenings and Saturdays at those sites.
“Even still, we’re not seeing the large numbers we typically see,” Knighten said. “We are certainly concerned children could fall behind on their immunization schedules, which, over time if not corrected, could increase the potential for infectious disease spread.”
Knighten said the Oklahoma City, Tulsa and state health departments are launching a statewide campaign on social media to remind parents of the importance of staying on track with childhood immunization schedules.
The Tulsa Health Department issued a news release in April warning if routine vaccination is postponed the community could be faced not only with a COVID-19 pandemic but an outbreak of other diseases, such as measles.
“While we are focusing on COVID-19, we don’t want to forget that routine childhood immunizations protect against numerous other vaccine-preventable diseases,” Ellen Niemitalo, immunizations manager, said in the release.
Oklahoma requires kindergarteners to be immunized against 10 diseases unless parents are granted an exemption on medical, religious or personal grounds. The number of approved vaccine exemptions doubled from 2,417 in 2014 to 5,082 in 2019, according to state data. Most were for non-medical reasons.
A new rule aimed at parents seeking religious and personal exemptions was set to go into effect Sept. 11 but has been delayed for one year. The rule requires parents to first view an instructional video on benefits and risks of immunizations before receiving a non-medical exemption.
Oklahomans for Health and Parental Rights, a political action committee that promotes exemptions, strongly opposed the requirement, calling it forced vaccine propaganda.
Dr. Lance Frye, Oklahoma’s interim health commissioner, took emergency action in July to postpone the effective date of the new rule until Sept. 15, 2021.
Frye said doing so “refocuses agency resources to the frontlines of the pandemic and will minimize the number of individuals walking into a county health department at a time when these facilities are operating at maximum capacity to administer free COVID-19 tests.”