Vaccination rates have been falling in recent years, both on a local and national level. The trend is blamed at least partly on anti-vaccine activism, leading to more parents claiming religious and medical exemptions. Just before the end of 2025, the United States topped 2,000 measles cases for the year – a milestone the country hasn’t seen since 1992.
On November 10, 2025, the Louisiana Department of Health confirmed its third case of measles since January 1, 2025. And according to a report released by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in November 2025 entitled, “Status of Child Immunization in Louisiana,” the percentage of vaccinated kindergartners dropped “from 96% for the 2020-21 school year to only 91.65% for the 2024-25 school year,” a period of just four years, as the Louisiana Illuminator reports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says at least 95% of kindergarteners need to be vaccinated against the measles to provide population-level protection, often referred to as herd immunity. It can help prevent outbreaks and protect the most vulnerable children.
State data from 2024 also reveals that just 64% of 2-year-olds in Louisiana had received all the recommended vaccinations against whooping cough, polio and other deadly infectious diseases. Last year, Louisiana’s Republican-appointed surgeon general banned all state public health promotion of vaccines. And in a Washington Post investigation, published December 31, 2025, it looked at kindergarten vaccination rates for states across the country. As Louisiana Public Radio reports, the Post report discovered that Louisiana children are among the least vaccinated against measles in the country and also confirmed that not a single parish had rates high enough to ensure herd immunity.
As the American Academy of Pediatrics recently pointed out in a Facebook post, the Post reports that at least 5.2 million kindergarten-age children in the U.S. are living in counties where vaccination rates for classrooms have fallen below the herd immunity threshold [up from 3.5 million before the COVID-19 pandemic.
