49 California Counties Report Rising Vaccination Rates
SB 277 has not come into effect yet either.
Maybe people are finally catching on?
State health officials released data last week showing the 49 counties trending upward with 92.9% of kindergartners across the state being up to date on their shots for the 2015-16 school year, an increase from 90.4% the previous term.
An even bigger cause for optimism is small decline in personal belief exemptions before they are completely done away with courtesy of SB 277. One anti-vaccine stronghold has been Marin County, but Dr. Matt Willis, the county’s Public Health Officer, reports that personal belief exemption claims have dropped from 6.45% last year to 5.97% this year.
One more hurdle is “conditional entry.” Dr. Willis described it as a means for children getting caught up on vaccinations to still be enrolled, but then some of them end up getting the rest of the shots. Across the state, conditional admissions for kindergartners are down 2.5% as well, 6.9% in 2014-15 dropped to 4.4% in 2015-16. Willis said that that Disneyland measles outbreak served as a real wake up call for a lot of families.
With SB 277 kicking in this July, the next batch of data should be interesting to dig into.
More on the current vaccination trends can be found here.
Image Credit: Flickr User NIAID, https://flic.kr/p/nQg4F7 via (CC BY 2.0)
