New England is faring better than the rest of the country when it comes to measles vaccinations, but a new study from Boston Children's Hospital's finds that New Hampshire’s vaccination rate is a little lower than the rest of the region.
Dr. Benjamin Rader, scientific director of the innovation group at Boston Children’s and co-author of the new study, said that as measles cases have been spreading across the country, he and other researchers have been assessing New England’s risk by looking at the number of children aged 5 and under who have been vaccinated.
Rader said New Hampshire’s smaller population means there’s less of a risk for an outbreak. However, with the state's lower vaccination rate, if measles were introduced, there could be an outbreak.
“The population of people under five or children under five that are not vaccinated is less than ideal,” Rader said. “Within New Hampshire there are small localized pockets where vaccination is even lower than that.”
For the study, Rader said they asked participants if they have children and if they were vaccinated against measles. They then modeled estimates of how many kids were vaccinated in the U.S.
Areas like Dover, Concord and Newport were shown to have a lower MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination rates than the rest of the state.
According to the study, Merrimack County shows a vaccination rate of 65% for children 5 and under, where Hillsborough County is 74%.
South Carolina has had over 600 cases of measles reported this year alone, as of earlier this week. Some counties in South Carolina have vaccination rates for children aged 5 and under that fall between 50-60%.
Rader said the reasons for variations in vaccination rates aren’t always straightforward.
“There may be all sorts of effects related to urban, rural, that are driving some of this – how people interact with their providers, what provider trust looks like, how people are willing to report into a surveillance system like ours,” Rader said. “All of these things might drive some of those effects.”
Rader said part of the study was inspired by anti-vaccination rhetoric across the U.S. that grew during the introduction of the COVID vaccine.
Before then, Rader said people opposed to vaccination tended to not reflect the country at large. A study he and his colleagues published last year shows that those who show hesitancy with MMR vaccines are some of the same people who showed vaccine hesitancy during COVID.
“I think people are getting all sorts of information, much of it not true, so people are making what appears to be reasonable decisions based on incomplete information and lack of trust in the healthcare system,” Rader said. “I think there's a lot of things that drive anti-vaccine sentiment. But yeah, we do see it across the U.S.”
Rader said they’ve seen concern about the MMR vaccine largely in southern states, but the U.S. is not the only country that holds these concerns.
“Canada is experiencing a measles outbreak of their own,” Rader said. ”This isn't just isolated in a specific region, and it's something that we, as public health researchers and practitioners, need to figure out how to tackle together.”
Measles, mumps and rubella all have their own risks when it comes to children, Rader said. Rubella, Rader said, is dangerous during pregnancy, and high levels of hospitalizations occur for children who get measles under the age of one. Rader said the MMR vaccine has never been recommended for children under the age of one, so he said they’re a vulnerable population.
He said herd immunity through vaccination has been one means of keeping children safe.
