How states can tackle vaccine hesitancy with data
People leave a COVID-19 testing and vaccination site at a public school in Los Angeles on Jan. 5, 2022. ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
From school safety to 'Tis the Sneezin’ public health campaigns, states are using public, local vaccination data to help people make better choices.
As COVID-19 ravaged the globe, public health officials in the U.S. used hyper-local data on hospitalizations, infection rates and tests to tackle the pandemic. Now, hyper-local data is helping health departments address a new risk to communities: declining vaccination rates among children.
And for the general public, hyper-local data is often more meaningful than regional- or state-level data because it reflects what’s happening in their community, said Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, during a webinar hosted by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials last week.
His remarks come as an increasing number of parents decline to vaccinate their children against formerly common childhood diseases like measles, mumps and rubella; polio; and chickenpox. The 2022-2023 school year, for instance, saw the highest reported level of kindergarteners skipping key vaccinations—3%, up from 2.6% the previous year—according to the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control.
Vohra pointed to a new dashboard launched by the Illinois Department of Public Health that tracks vaccination coverage among K-12 students in the state based on students’ immunization data from the State Board of Education for diseases like Hepatitis B, measles, chicken pox and polio.
It provides families with information to “make the kind of decisions that they need to have healthier lives for themselves and their loved ones,” Vohra said. Plus, the dashboard helps school district officials identify where gaps in vaccination rates exist and target efforts to get individuals vaccinated.
The dashboard also tracks whether students in each county have reached the threshold for community immunity for different viruses, which the health department defined as having enough immunized individuals in a community that it reduces the likelihood of nonvaccinated people getting infected.
Based on chicken pox vaccination data, for instance, Pope and Pulaski counties in the state’s southeastern corner have an average student immunization rate of 88%, indicating individuals in those communities have reached the immunity threshold, which is an immunization rate of 86% to 90%.
Connecticut has also maintained a school vaccination dashboard for several years, said Dr. Manisha Juthani, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Health. It provides school-level data and vaccination rates for different grades.
“We’re very fortunate that our vaccination rates, particularly at the kindergarten, school-entry level are now higher than they were pre-pandemic,” she said, with the support of “concerted efforts from public health pediatricians, school nurses [and] communities.”
“I think the school dashboard and all these various [efforts] that we’re doing are helping us keep our community safe,” Juthani said. In fact, vaccine exemption rates in Connecticut declined to 0.8% between the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school year, following the passage of a law that prohibits parents from citing religious opposition for exemptions.
“Having more [vaccine-related] information can help people make better decisions, especially from a public health point of view,” Dr. Alex McDonald, a physician and member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, told Route Fifty. McDonald also serves on the local school board in Claremont, California.
That state’s dashboard tracks immunization rates at schools and child care facilities, he said. That information not only helps inform parents on which schools have higher vaccination rates than others for their children’s safety, but also guides public health messaging, he said.
By identifying gaps in vaccine coverage in the state, public health officials can better target education and awareness efforts, McDonald said. Lower vaccination rates in a specific area, for instance, could reveal a lack of access to health clinics or the impact of vaccine-related misinformation and disinformation.
Officials can use that information to determine the people who would benefit from vaccination education and the best way to get it to them.
The Illinois Department of Public Health last year, for instance, launched its ‘Tis the Sneezin’ campaign amid elevated levels of COVID-19 hospitalizations in six counties. The effort included short videos shared on social media and other online channels depicting how respiratory viruses are spread while using ride shares, taking the elevator and even sitting in school detention.
The campaign, said Vohra, of Illinois, helped “make sure that people understood the importance of being healthy, protecting those that are most compromised from getting sick [and] how critical vaccinations are to making sure that every community in Illinois is as safe as possible.”
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