The rates of measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccination declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers reported in a new paper.
In a research letter dated June 2, researchers found that the county-level mean vaccination rate of MMR vaccination was 93.9 percent before the pandemic. The rate dropped to 91.2 percent after the pandemic.
Lauren Gardner, with the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland, and co-authors analyzed data from state health departments and other sources to track county-level changes in MMR vaccination from the 2017–18 school year to the 2023-2024 school year.
Researchers were able to obtain data for 33 states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington state, and Wisconsin….