Fewer children are receiving their routine vaccinations today than before the COVID-19 pandemic, opening the door to three seasonal diseases coming down the pike and dormant diseases that modern society hasn’t dealt with, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Chief Medical Executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian and Bureau of Epidemiology and Population Health Director Dr. Sarah Lyon-Callo told the state Board of Education that the statewide routine vaccinations, such as measles, mumps, rubella and polio, had fallen to 66.3%, after rebounding a bit after big drop after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re trying to keep all the crud – that’s a technical term – out of the schools,” Bagdasarian joked with the board during her presentation.
Board of Education members talked extensively about what could or could not be done about the current COVID-19 variant and what the best course of action for schools should be.
“It is not just about COVID anymore. It is about all of the things,” Bagdasarian said.
Lyon-Callo said the three diseases MDHHS was looking at were the COVID-19 variant, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and influenza. The peak season for weekly hospitalizations of all three is expected to reach 25 per 100,000. To compare, just the COVID-19 omicron peak was nearly 40 during the 2021-2022 season.
“The flu still kills people,” Bagdasarian said.
She said they couldn’t predict when the peak would be, because it was different every year. She said she was hoping the three peaks wouldn’t be at the same time.
On top of an expected uptick in the three seasonal diseases, Bagdasarian said the growth in the number of counties with childhood vaccine coverage of 70% or lower was concerning. More than 50 counties fell into that category, when in 2017 there were eight counties.
She said parents should be looking to their local health departments to find out what the vaccination percentage was in the area, because there were some that were 95%, but others in the state were as low as 10%.
“If you have a child with cancer, if you have a child with an organ transplant, it is really important you know the type of environment that they’re going into, because just being around a highly under-vaccinated population could put your child at risk,” she said.
She said routine vaccination diseases are not “natural immunity” diseases and that the spread of those is beyond anything Michiganders have seen in decades.
She said just being in a room 15 minutes after someone is infected with measles would be dangerous.
“If you don’t have immunity to measles, your chance of getting it is greater than 90%,” she said. “So, chances are if you are in an unvaccinated environment, almost everyone who was not vaccinated against measles would get measles.”
She said routine vaccinations were the only way of getting immunity to those diseases, which have a high fatality and critical illness rate.
“Part of the issue is that we are the victim of our own success. People don’t know what these diseases look like. They don’t know what diphtheria looks like. They don’t know what pertussis looks like. They don’t know what polio looks like,” she said.
Lyon-Callo said there were no outbreaks of any of those diseases currently in Michigan, but the MDHHS was ready if something happened.
“What these numbers show us is that we have to push back harder than ever before on the anti-science rhetoric that continues to be spewed,” Board President Pamela Pugh said.
Pugh said the consequences of not getting vaccinated went beyond the scope of just the child of a parent getting sick, but also pointed to protecting the whole community.
“This is behavior that greatly proliferated during the global pandemic but continues to threaten the public’s health, our public health system, and our children’s ability to remain healthy and in school,” Pugh said.
