D.C. officials will enforce a longstanding but historically ignored law requiring students be up to date on their routine vaccines in order to enroll in schools.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser has vowed to enforce for the upcoming academic year a long-standing but historically ignored law that says students need to be up to date on their vaccines against diseases including measles, polio and whooping cough to enroll in schools. But the promise to enforce the mandate has underscored just how many students in the District are behind on their vaccinations, and how far compliance rates plummeted in the pandemic when many families skipped doctors’ appointments.
D.C. Department of Health official Asad Bandealy said the city would be issuing robocalls to the families of the more than 20,000 children who are out of date on their vaccines. Staff would personally call about 6,000 families, with a focus on those with 4- to 6-year-olds. Children in this age group have the most new vaccine requirements and many enrolled in primary schools during the height of the pandemic — a time when families were less likely to go to routine doctor appointments.
In public health, a population has herd immunity against a virus once 95 percent of the population is vaccinated. But D.C. schools struggled to reach this threshold even before the pandemic. Much of that has been due to vaccine hesitancy and misinformation about the immunizations and school requirements.
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