Rising Vaccine Exemptions Raise Concerns for School Health

Originally published Aug. 2024, on KACU 89.5 FM, Abilene’s NPR Station.

Script:

HOST INTRO

The public’s concern about the COVID-19 vaccine has caused some to distrust vaccines that have been effective for decades. K-A-C-U’s Baylie Simon reports on what’s affecting childhood immunization rates in Texas…

(BTSvax : SOC)

Schools require children to be vaccinated against Hepatitis A -and-B, chicken pox, polio, measles, mumps and rubella—as well as diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.

Statewide around 94-percent of students get those shots.

Texas Health and Human Services reported that parents claimed more than 72-thousand conscientious exemptions to vaccines in the 2019 school year. The most recent report, for the 2022 school year, shows that number has grown to more than 100-thousand.

Doctor Jason Terk, former chairman of the Texas Public Health Coalition, believes that many people’s distrust in these vaccines is misdirected because the information they consume is not backed by scientific fact. 

(Terk :13  “Just because someone says something that is highly influential or someone or someone who is highly regarded or admired by people doesn’t mean that what they’re saying is true.”)

Doctor Terk says these childhood vaccinations are key to protecting individual children as well as those in their community with compromised immune systems or who are unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons.

I’m Baylie Simon, in Abilene.

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