OPINION: Alabama is bucking anti-vaccination trend
First the bad news: Vaccination rates for kindergarten children across much of the United States have plunged since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report published this week by The Washington Post.
This, unfortunately, is no surprise. It comes as the nation’s top public health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wages a full-court press against vaccinations, and especially childhood vaccinations.
“The share of U.S. counties where 95% or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles — the number needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as “herd immunity” — has dropped from 50% before the pandemic to 28%, according to The Post’s examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia,” the newspaper reported.
This is not merely speculation. The political element is evident in the data The Post examined. The decline in kindergarten vaccination rates tends to be greater in counties President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election than in those won by Vice President Kamala Harris, although the declines occurred almost everywhere.
Alabama’s neighbors to the north in Tennessee have seen some of the most troubling declines.
“While children in California, which does not allow for nonmedical vaccine exemptions, are vaccinated against measles at 96%, there is not a single county in Idaho, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah or Wisconsin whose kindergarten rates meet herd immunity protection level,” according to The Post.
But now the good news: Alabama has bucked the anti-vaccination trend.
“In Maine, Alabama and Connecticut, vaccination rates went up since the pandemic,” The Post reported.
We can see the sad results of children’s parents foregoing the routine vaccinations that millions of children have had for decades.
“As of Dec. 30, there have been 2,065 confirmed measles cases in the U.S. in 2025, according to data published Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The last time there were more than 2,000 cases reported in one year was in 1992, just a couple years after health leaders updated recommendations to say that children should get two doses of the measlesmumps- rubella (MMR) vaccine instead of just one,” CNN reported this week.
As a result, the U.S. is close to losing its elimination status for measles. And while measles carries its own dangers, another complication from the disease is it makes people more vulnerable to other diseases.
Research conducted by Michael Mina, a former assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard Medical School, found that “measles causes immune amnesia — when the immune system forgets how to fight off infections it successfully dealt with before — and showed that this effect lasts for years, not weeks or months. This leaves patients profoundly vulnerable to pathogens they have previously been vaccinated against or exposed to, and to which they would ordinarily be immune,” explains an article published this past March in Harvard Magazine.
The anti-vaccine agenda promoted by RFK Jr. under the banner of “Making America Healthy Again” is doing the exact opposite.
The vaccines children get as a requirement to attend school help keep all children safe, including those who are immunocompromised or who, for some medical reason, cannot be vaccinated.
Fortunately, most Alabama parents are heeding their pediatricians’ advice, and not the increasingly compromised pronouncements coming from Washington.
