Although since most kids go to school, school size is probably a good measure of this. Bigger schools mean that an infected person can infect more vulnerable people.
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They aren’t quite mandatory here in the States, which is why people get away with not vaccinating. And the madness is even worse than you think!
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Re: LA 2014
The date there is significant, California seriously raised the bar for exemptions a few years ago (maybe 2015? many of the articles mention it), and has had a major improvement.
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Interesting, looking at more detailed data for the schools around me (2014):
There is a category ‘completed vaccinations’. And then there are two reasons not to be in that category. ‘exemption’ which is overwhelmingly vaccine resisters of some sort (perhaps 1% could be the rare kids with a health issue). ‘Out-of-compliance’ which is kids that haven’t received all of their vaccinations.
Exemption seems pretty strongly correlated with wealth, but super low in a few rich neighborhoods near the big university and two big hospitals.
Out-of-compliance is strongly correlated with lower income. I’m thinking that’s people who aren’t as well plugged into healthcare. Don’t go to the doctor regularly, etc. Be interesting to see if that has improved since 2014, with Obamacare the child insurance rate in Washington hit 97% and child preventative visits became free for a lot of people.
Well vaccination rates at the schools nearest me seem to be up 2014-2017, and the compliance rate is a bit better. Exemptions seem to be down a lot.
Maybe people are wising up?
There is also some fine detail within exemptions. Some people seem to think they have a better idea about vaccine schedules, so deviate from the recommended and required schedule. But its a lot less bad, for public health, to have a kid who gets some of their vaccinations six months or a year late than a kid that is actually unvaccinated and from a family who is unvaccinated.
Up to date data:
https://data.kingcounty.gov/dataset/SY-2017-18-Kindergarten-Immunization-Coverage/fzwm-friw
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Oh, and good grief, if you are hoping to have your kid experience whooping cough or measles get them into a private school or even public option school!
What we’d really need is some sort of vaccination against stupid.
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“Herd immunity” is generally measured as a percent of the population, but it also ties to the vaccine, too.
Exposure time to an infected carrier is what increases the risk to a person. If 90% of people receive the vaccine, and the vaccine is 90% effective, 19% are potential carriers who could expose the disease to the weaker members of the herd. And since you never know if you are one of the 90% or of the 10%, you are always at some risk, and you are always potentially exposing others.
Knowing 10000 people aren’t vaccinated doesn’t help when you don’t know the size of the herd. Percentages help you figure it out.
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This continues to blow my mind. Of all the things that should be subsidized up the wazoo, vaccines are at or near the top of the list.
Can you say public health emergency? Because the rest of the world can. Hell, we go our vaccines at school. The only parental cost was thr time spent signing the authorisation slip.
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I wonder if the ‘rich’ parents were people of the generation before vaccines came into common use for the big childhood 3: measles, mumps, and chicken pox. “Hell, I got all 3 by being exposed to them, and I turned out just fine!” twitch
The only vaccine my kid can get at school is the yearly flu shot, and they charge more at school than my copay is, so we go to the pediatrician for that.
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You’re getting hosed. It’s free-at- consumption here.
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I know. You probably only pay something like $30 for broadband internet and cable TV, too. You’d choke on your morning coffee if I told you how much our bill is.
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Again, speaking as a Finn, this sounds completely ridiculous to me. Basic vaccinations should be free of charge; they’re such an obvious public good where a small government investment saves a huge amount of future health care costs and human suffering.
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Broadband runs about 85 per month. Cable (skytv) is expensive and yet worthless.
(P.s. I am literally having my morning coffee 
)
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I would never defend the “health care” system of the US. It is worse than most 3rd world nations. And yeah, it’s lunacy to leave kids vulnerable to preventable diseases because every middle-man leach in the US health care/insurance system wants to stick their hand in the pie.
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I remember where you live, your avatar reminds us every time you comment. 
We’re getting kinda off topic, but that surprises me that your cable bill is that much. In the US, we’ve pretty much come to expect that we’re going to get overcharged for damned near everything compared to our peer nations.
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The cost of living here is stupid high, for all the usual reasons, plus a couple of exciting new ones we managed to inflict on ourselves.
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My point being, from the quote, they don’t know yet exactly what the problem is; money, religion, lack of information (as opposed to religion), or what have you. That a problem exists I’m fully on board with.
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My wife and I used to live in Utah County, which was mentioned in the article. We were college students and didn’t have health insurance. We went to the offices of the county board of health in Provo as adults and received vaccinations for free, or for like a buck or two. It wasn’t a hardship and it wasn’t hard to get in to have it done.
We had our son vaccinated at similar facilities in other states as he was growing up, again for free or super cheap. The public schools in those places tell the parents and guardians of school kids that these vaccines are available and how to get them, and that they are required for kids who attend public schools.
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In reply to a couple of the posts above, from the article:
VT, CA, MS, and WV were excluded from our analysis because they no longer have NMEs in their respective states.
