Welcome to Wellness on Mass. I'm Dr. Nicole Sapphire. Today we are going to take a closer look at the childhood vaccine schedule.

It's a topic that's becoming increasingly complex in recent years when I was in medical school.

You know, it's not really something we talked about. We knew it existed and that was it.

Kind of settled science. You don't really talk much about it. Just is what it is.

I have learned more about the childhood vaccine schedule over the last five years than I think I even

spent for the preceding 15, 20 years in my career. But here's this situation. Nationally,

vaccination rates among children are absolutely slipping.

CDC data shows that kindergarten coverage for measles, mumps, and rebella, that MMR vaccine,

has fallen to about 93%. That's down from over 95%, which is our target just a few years ago.

Now, I know 2% doesn't really sound like that big of a deal, but I can tell you that 2% difference.

It's tens of hundreds of thousands of children, and it's enough to fuel localized outbreaks, and that's a problem.

At the same time, also, vaccination exemptions for kindergartners have reached the highest levels

ever recorded in the United States.

Now, there are many reasons behind this, the lingering fallout of the COVID-19 mandates,

which is, we all know, are a complete disaster and uncalled for, increased online misinformation

and just the growing political movement, and maybe

it's not even political, just the growing movement questioning whether mandates belong in

schools at all. Florida recently announced its intent to remove all vaccine requirements for

students, this, you know, fueling and sparking the national debate about the balance

between individual choice and community safety. I'll share something personal here because I'm an

open book. I've always tried to be that way as I've entered the public space. My own, one of my own

kiddos, I have three sons, you know, one of my own kids in middle school.

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