Childhood Vaccination Rates Decline In The Hudson Valley

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — As children prepare to return to school across the Hudson Valley, district officials are reminding parents of the rules for vaccination in New York.

Children attending day care and pre-K through 12th grade in New York State must receive all required doses of vaccines on the recommended schedule in order to attend or remain in school. This includes all public, private, and religious schools.

A medical exemption is allowed when a child has a medical condition that prevents them from receiving a vaccine. There are no nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine requirements in NYS. For more information about medical exemptions visit the Child Care Programs, Schools and Post-Secondary Institutions.

The official childhood vaccination series is: 4 doses of DTaP, 3 doses IPV, 1 dose MMR, 3 doses Hib, 3 doses HepB, 1 dose Varicella, and 4 doses PCV.

"High childhood vaccination rates are critical to maintaining community-level protection against diseases that were commonplace before the advent of vaccines," said Michael J. Nesheiwat, MD, Putnam County’s interim health commissioner, where health officials are reminding parents that the shots are as important as school supplies and new shoes.

The extent to which children received the full series varies widely in the Hudson Valley. Moreover, since 2016, rates have declined in most counties in the region, one — Rockland — sharply.

"We recognize vaccine hesitancy as a worldwide problem, compounded by the mistrust in vaccines that was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Timely completion of the childhood vaccine series was also made harder by decreased access to care, especially preventative, during the pandemic," Beth Cefalu, Director of Strategic Communications in the Rockland County Executive's Office, told Patch.

Here's the most recent data from the state Department of Health, with the state's Prevention Agenda benchmark in green:

"Disruption in well-child visits and a decline in vaccine administration during the COVID-19 pandemic is well documented," Dr. Nesheiwat said.

Vaccines have made illness and death from early childhood diseases like rubella, diphtheria, and polio a rarity today, unlike the early 1900s, when they widely circulated and resulted in numerous fatalities. However, early childhood diseases have not been eradicated in the U.S., and childhood diseases remain a serious health threat worldwide in countries with lower vaccination rates, health officials said.

Measles, for example, still circulates around the world with over 100,000 deaths annually. And it's one of the two infectious diseases that have surfaced in Rockland County in the past five years.

Rockland's 11-month measles outbreak in 2018-19 was the longest-running in the United States since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. It mostly affected children — 80 percent of the 312 cases were in people under 19 years old. And it mostly affected the unvaccinated — officials said 92 percent of the local cases never had received or had documentation of receiving the measles vaccine.

Then in 2022, the nation’s first polio case in nearly a decade resulted in paralysis for a young Rockland man. The highly infectious virus circulated for months in Orange, Rockland and Sullivan counties.

Childhood vaccination rates for polio are higher than for other childhood vaccines in the Hudson Valley, according to the latest state data; still, the counties that lag in the other vaccines also lag on polio:

• Dutchess County: 76.43 percent
• Orange: 58.68
• Putnam: 78.00
• Rockland: 60.34
• Sullivan: 62.33
• Ulster: 73.70
• Westchester: 76.13

"Our Health department is aggressively working with state health, education officials, and Rockland County providers to improve these numbers — of which some of that progress is underscored by the nearly 30,000 polio vaccines administered since the case surfaced last year, in addition to negative wastewater testing for polio since last fall," Cefalu told Patch.

Dr. Nesheiwat encouraged families to call and visit their personal health care providers soon to schedule their children's immunizations since this is a busy time of year for many health care practices.

Here are resources for families on childhood vaccinations from the American Academy of Pediatrics:

• See recommended immunization schedules (Healthychildren.org)
• Learn the importance of getting caught up on childhood immunizations during the COVID-19 pandemic (Healthychildren.org)
• Learn how vaccines work (Healthychildren.org)