By Courtenay Harris Bond

Copyright phillyvoice

About 1 in 6 American parents say they have delayed or skipped vaccines for their children, according to a new poll.

The survey, published Monday, found the majority of parents favor routine childhood vaccinations and school mandates for inoculations. But 16% of parents said they have delayed or skipped at least one vaccination for their children – excluding flu or COVID-19 shots.

Nearly one-quarter of Republican parents reported skipping vaccines for their children, with those who identify with President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement being particularly likely. Almost 50% of parents who homeschooled their children and nearly 20% of parents under 35 also said they had delayed or skipped a vaccine.

Yet, the survey also showed that the vast majority of parents, including Republicans, support vaccines.

“We still have strong support for vaccines among parents in this country,” Liz Hamel, KFF vice president and director of public opinion and survey research, told the Washington Post. “What we don’t know yet is whether those slight cracks we’re starting to see in confidence among younger parents are going to translate into actual decisions around vaccines.”

For the survey, the Washington Post and KFF, a nonprofit focused on health policy research, polling and news, interviewed 2,700 parents in July and August. More than one-third of the parents have children under 6 and have had to make vaccination decisions since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The reasons for vaccine hesitancy among the parents polled included worries about side effects and a lack of trust in safety. People also reported feeling that not all recommended vaccines are necessary.

A large number of parents said they were unsure what to believe about false claims that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine can cause autism. Only 9% of parents said they believed this long-disproven claim, but 48% of parents said they lacked enough information to determine whether it was true.

An analysis conducted by NBC News, released Monday, found that childhood vaccination rates have fallen in 77% of U.S. counties since 2019 — and a large portion of the country lacks the herd immunity needed to prevent the spread of measles.

As of last week, there had been 1,454 reported measles cases this year, the most in the United States since 1992, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There had been 37 outbreaks, including one in Texas that sickened more than 700 people and killed two unvaccinated children. The outbreak was declared over in mid-August after 42 days without any new cases reported.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Jessica Steier, founder of Unbiased Science, discussed how Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others have perpetuated false claims that vaccines cause autism.

Kennedy recently chose another vaccine skeptic, David Geier – who has led flawed and debunked studies about autism and vaccines, to help conduct a new federal study on the subject.

“(T)he scientific reality is that we have at least 43 very high quality studies that have involved close to 6 million people across several countries that have found no connection between vaccines and autism,” Steier said in a webinar last week hosted by the Association of Health Care Journalists.

Of the 26 studies that found some link between vaccines and autism, “they’ve been heavily criticized by myself, by many others, for using deceptive research techniques and flawed data,” Steier said.

A vaccine advisory panel to the CDC is scheduled to meet Thursday. Among other steps, the committee is expected to vote on recommendations for the MMR, COVID and hepatitis B vaccines.

In June, Kennedy announced that he was “reconstituting” the entire committee, replacing the 17 members with his own picks in order to “re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.”

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, learned in early September that he had been blocked from an extended term on the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biologics Products Advisory Committee.

“I think that when RFK Jr says he’s interested in vaccine safety, what he really means is he’s interested in finding studies that support his fixed, immutable belief that vaccines cause harm, especially (that they) cause chronic diseases like autism and others,” Offit said during last week’s webinar. “So he will very quickly dismiss any articles that show that he’s wrong, and very quickly do his one-trick-pony thing, which is to say everybody’s in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. That’s what he means when he says gold standard science or landmark science. He usually means something that supports his point of view, that is invariably a methodologically flawed study.”