About two weeks ago, 2025 officially became the year with the most reported measles cases since the disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000. In only seven months, the country hit nearly 1,300 cases, exceeding the number of cases reported in all of 2024. Those rates manifested in a very real way in Texas this summer, as a highly publicized measles outbreak has ripped through the state.
Though nothing like the situation in Texas has occurred in Missouri, local vaccination rates aren’t promising — in fact, they’ve seen a steep drop. According to data from the State Department of Health and Senior Services, 96% of Greene County kindergartners in the 2019-2020 school year had received the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. By the 2023-2024 school year, that was only 90.9%. The numbers in neighboring Christian County are even more alarming. There, the drop was from 95.2% in 2019 to only 78.8% in 2023. (KSMU reached out to the Christian County Health Department for comment on these rates but were unable to secure a comment before publication.)
Why are rates dropping?
Though an anti-vaccine movement has existed in some form for decades, the past five years have seen a drop so steep that it requires an explanation. Laura Ankrom, a pediatrician at Mercy, talks to parents and children about vaccines nearly every day. She told KSMU that, as with many things, the turning point was the COVID-19 pandemic.
"People were concerned that the COVID vaccine was created too quickly, [and that] there wasn’t enough data and evidence and studies," she said. "Which is very different from what all the rest of our vaccines. A lot of these vaccines went through sometimes a decade’s worth of research."
Ankrom argues that that particular skepticism eventually grew into a skepticism of immunizations as a whole, encouraged by an increasingly loud chorus of anti-vaccine voices. Though Ankrom didn’t mention anyone in particular, it’s relevant to mention that RFK Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, has long held publicly anti-vaccine views which public health experts have called dangerous.
Stephanie Woehl, Communicable Disease Prevention Coordinator at the Springfield-Greene County Health Department, was more reticent to ascribe a cause to the shift, calling it a "multifaceted" issue to which she couldn’t speak directly without conducting a study. Nevertheless, she also pointed towards the pandemic as a possible influence.
"A lot of preventative care resources were paused or limited as part of that response," she said.
Is the area at risk?
For a highly infectious disease like measles, vaccination rates need to sit around 95% for herd immunity — a level of immunization where even unvaccinated individuals are at extremely low risk — to be maintained. With MMR vaccination rates among children dipping below that threshold, cases in both the north and south of the state (as well as five less-reported cases in Cedar County) seem even more concerning.
Ankrom says there’s cause for that concern. She told KSMU that although state vaccination rates are dangerously low, the numbers are probably even lower, since MODHSS doesn’t collect data on home schooled children, who Ankrom says are more likely to go without immunizations.
"You're just kind of waiting for the ball to drop here, unfortunately," she said.
What can be done?
When it came to the question of how to reverse these trends, Woehl was reluctant to give a clear-cut answer, telling KSMU that "I think that if we had that answer, vaccination rates would be going up."
What she did say, though, largely aligned with what Ankrom said as well: the key has to be in meeting parents where they are and gaining their trust. Ankrom tailors her approach to the specific concerns of each parent and tries to keep in mind that ultimately, both she and them want what’s best for the child’s health.
"A lot of families, I think, have some concerns about information that’s provided by the government," she said. "If they don’t want to use the CDC as a resource for finding out vaccine information, I often will send them to — Children’s Hospital Philadelphia has a website called the Vaccine Education Center."
Both interviewees said that, if you or your child are currently unvaccinated, it’s not too late to change that — even if it gets a bit trickier the longer you wait. For Greene County residents, the Health Department has resources available for both children and adults who want to protect themselves and do their part to reverse the decline in immunizations.