Number of Ky. parents claiming religious exemption for kids’ shots rises 59% after new state rule makes exemption easier to get
More Kentucky children are not being immunized “for medical and religious reasons,” Ashleigh Mills reports for Spectrum News. “Doctors worry the number could be growing because of misinformation circulating online.”
In the last school year, parents of 442 sixth graders exempted them from vaccines. That was only 1.5 percent of the total, but an increase of 59 percent from the 278 in the 2016-17 school year.
Julie Miracle, a nurse consultant with the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, told Mills, “I think there is miscommunication out there. I think that people are looking on the internet, and there’s you know, false information out there. [Children] would not be protected, and so when they get those exemptions, that they are vulnerable to those diseases.”
Miracle encourages parents to use authoritative sources, such as the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for information on vaccines.