School-by-school vaccination data show some Connecticut schools have high numbers of religious or medical exemptions

The state’s first-ever release of school-by-school vaccination data show some smaller schools have high numbers of students receiving religious or medical exemptions from vaccines, eclipsing 20 percent in number cases.

Legislative leaders responded swiftly to records showing 108 Connecticut schools fall under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended 95 percent immunization rate for measles, mumps, rubella vaccines in kindergartners.

Lawmakers, public health officials and staffers from the governor’s office said Friday they will meet next week to come up with a way to try to reverse the state’s sliding vaccination rate. It comes at a time when the nation is experiencing the highest number of confirmed cases of measles in 25 years.

“It’s worrisome,” said House Majority Leader Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, who added that he found some of the exemptions rates “shocking.”

“I think we can all acknowledge there’s a problem, and you have to address it at some point,” Ritter said.

Gov. Ned Lamont called the report “shocking” and said he’s committed to boosting immunization rates. “This cannot become a public health crisis as we have seen in other states,” the Democratic governor said Friday. “Making sure all of our young students in Connecticut are safe is the number one priority.”

Health officials and medical professionals are concerned that the state’s protective cocoon is thinning.

“We had a sense of security with a 98 percent [statewide] immunization rate, but what we are now understanding is that in pockets of schools, that may be a false sense of security,” said Dr. Jack Ross, chief of infectious diseases at Hartford Hospital. “We are becoming ripe for the introduction of measles into populations with large numbers of unvaccinated children, and we are losing the protection and benefit of ‘herd immunity.’ “

DPH Commissioner Renée Coleman-Mitchell said while Connecticut’s immunization rate for measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination of kindergartners “remains high at 96.5%, we are also seeing a troubling trend that the number of students entering kindergarten who are not fully immunized is growing.”

She said the goal of releasing the data is to “increase public awareness of vaccination rates in local communities. Hopefully, this will lead to more engagement and focus on increasing immunization rates to reduce the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases.”

Some of the exemption rates defy predictability. For example, medical exemptions topped 10 percent at Chester Elementary School in the 2017-18 school year, but came in at 1.5 percent at neighboring Deep River Elementary School.

Ross said the level of understanding that doctors have for the requirements of a medical exemption can differ from practice to practice and can affect medical exemption rates from one community to the next.

He said young doctors who have never seen a measles case in their practice may not fully appreciate the consequences of the disease. He said doctors can also be influenced by a desire to satisfy parents, who also may not have seen the ravages of childhood diseases in prior generations.

Prospect Elementary School had medical exemptions surpassing 21 percent, according to DPH.

At the Crossway Christian Academy in Putnam, religious exemptions topped 10 percent and medical exemptions eclipsed 15 percent, for a total rate of nearly 26 percent.

In Newtown, 37.7 percent of students at Housatonic Valley Waldorf School had exemptions — 14.2 percent invoked the religious waiver and 23.6 had medical exemptions, according to the DPH data.

Some school districts disputed the data, and said their rate of exemptions was much lower than what the state reported, blaming the high numbers on clerical errors. Haddam Elementary School, for example, had a medical exemption rate of 19 percent, according to the DPH. But Region 17 Schools Superintendent Howard Thiery provided reports that show no students claimed a medical exemption in the 2017-18 school year and just six of the 190 students, or 3.1 percent, received a religious exemption.

LeeAnn Ducat, founder of Informed Choice CT, a group that argues vaccination should be a choice, was among a small group of parents that protested outside the Department of Public Health offices on Friday, arguing the data contains errors and shouldn’t have been released. Ducat said the report skewed the numbers and unnecessarily confused many people.

“They’re acting like there are these little Typhoid Marys walking around everywhere, and they’re just inciting panic in people,” she said.

Vincent Mustaro, the policy associate for the Connecticut Association of School Boards, said CABE advises school districts to clearly describe vaccination requirements and waivers to families. Mustaro, a former school superintendent in Oxford, Clinton and Madison, said the school-by-school data are valuable.

“Especially now that we see that diseases that we thought were eradicated are rearing their heads again,” Mustaro said.

The information was released as measles cases spike nationally and a local debate over religious exemptions intensifies. There have been three measles cases confirmed in Connecticut in recent months.

Outbreaks are less likely to occur at schools where high numbers of students are immunized. “Herd” immunity is achieved when the vaccination rate in school is high enough to protect unvaccinated children — the CDC says that number is 95 percent.

According to the CDC, schools are a leading venue for the transmission of vaccine-preventable disease, and contagious school-age children can further spread disease to their families and communities.

While medical reasons account for most of the exemptions, parochial schools were invoking religious exemptions in the 7 percent to 10 percent range, a higher rate than in past years.

In addition to pockets of the state where parents are using a religious exemption to avoid immunizing their children, Ritter said he also has concerns about number of parents who are citing medical reasons for foregoing vaccinations. “It appears that medical exemptions are also unusually high in some areas,” he said. “We’ll have to look at that.”

Public health officials have long taken pride in the state’s vaccination rate, among the nation’s highest. Yet the school-by-school information shows the overall rate of immunizations is misleading, given that, in some schools, growing numbers of students are unvaccinated.

“We have pockets that were as bad as California was at the height of their [measles] outbreaks,” Ritter said. Statewide vaccination rates gave parents and policymakers “a sense of comfort, when Connecticut … for years has been lucky to avoid some sort of outbreak. Our numbers suggest and indicate its only a matter of time that one of these schools could have an outbreak.”

Vaccinations have been a key topic at the state Capitol this year in light of the national measles outbreak. From January 1 to April 26, there were 704 confirmed cases of measles in 22 states; in more than 70 percent of the cases, the patients had not been vaccinated. Three have been three cases in Connecticut.

Ritter and other legislators are pushing to eliminate the religious exemption from vaccines and asked Attorney General William Tong to review constitutional questions surrounding that; Tong’s opinion is expected by the end of May. With the legislative session ending at midnight on June 5, there may not be enough time to pass a bill this session, but Ritter left the door open for a special session to address the issue before 2020.

While some who question the safety and efficacy of vaccines can chose not to receive them by citing religious liberty, people with compromised immune systems sometimes cannot receive vaccinations for medical reasons. “For those with compromised immune systems, for those kids with cancer, that is not a choice,” Ritter said. “Those are the kids … we’re sticking up for.”

Ritter said he attributes skepticism over vaccines to “junk science that has gone unchecked for a very long time” and said he has never had a religious leader reach out to him and tell him that their faith precludes vaccinations.

Linehan said the data might make it easier to have a policy discussion on the often fraught issue of vaccinations. Critics of vaccinations have spoken out at public hearings and forums at the state Capitol, but the voices of vaccine supporters have generally been more muted.

“There’s been plenty of information and study after study that show that vaccines for the most part are safe,” she said. “We need the public to say what they want us to do … this is the time to speak up.”

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.

Josh Kovner can be reached at jkovner@courant.com.

An earlier version of this story included an inaccurate number from Redding that was in the initial release of information but was subsequently corrected by the state.