JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – As Northeast Florida families prepare for another school year, a Jacksonville pediatrician with more than 40 years of medical experience is sounding the alarm over falling vaccination rates for the immunizations required for school-age children.
In Florida, kindergarten through 12th-grade students must have the required vaccines for their age before they can enroll in school.
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Those vaccines include measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR); diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTaP or Tdap); polio; Hepatitis b; and varicella (chickenpox).
Without all of the required shots, a student must have either a religious exemption -- obtained from the health department -- or a medical exemption -- obtained from their doctor.
But statistics from the Florida Department of Health that track the percentage of kindergarten and seventh-grade students who have all of their required vaccinations show those numbers are dropping in a manner concerning to health experts.
“So I think it will take the death and suffering of children in order to wake parents up and for them to understand,” says Dr. Jeffrey Goldhagen, professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida.
He says Florida is at the point where there is no longer herd immunity against some vaccine-preventable illnesses. Herd immunity is reached at 95% immunization.
In 2015, 93.7% of kindergarteners statewide had all of their required vaccinations. That figure dropped to 88.7% by the 2024-2025 school year.
Duval County saw a similar drop, going from 91.1% in 2016 to 89.9% this past school year, a figure still above the statewide number.
Other counties around our area still remain above the statewide figure as well, in the 2024-2025 school year:
- St. Johns: 90.6%
- Clay: 93.6%
- Nassau: 91.8%
(Scroll down for an interactive look at vaccination rates in all counties over time)
Among seventh-grade students, Duval County’s vaccination rate has seen a slight rebound after a dramatic drop.
In the 2015-2016 school year, 95.9% of students were fully vaccinated. By the 2022-2023 school year, that had dropped to 83.1%. The figure did rebound in the past two years, rising to 91.8% in the last school year.
Compared to the state during this time frame, Duval County’s numbers have been lower. In 2016, 96.3% of seventh graders in Florida were fully vaccinated. That fell to 92.1% in 2024-2025.
Other Northeast Florida counties have also seen decreases, but their vaccination rates remain higher than Duval’s among seventh graders. In the previous school year:
- St. Johns: 94%
- Clay: 94.3%
- Nassau: 95.5%
(Scroll down for an interactive look at vaccination rates in all counties over time)
Goldhagen voiced concerns about the downward trends.
“And the trajectory that we’re on, that we will see the resurgence of diseases that are vaccine-preventable, that multiple children will be dying from and or incurring significant long-term consequences,” he said. “So I’m actually fairly pessimistic at this point, until we get to a point where people see their neighbor’s kids dying, people see their kids impacted, and it will be, it’ll be a sad situation.”
Parent Ann Teagle says her children received their required vaccines for school, but she wonders about the efficacy of other vaccines for COVID-19 or the flu.
“I guess what it is, is that we have a lot more problems than we are used to, more allergies, more disorders, whether they are diagnosed more now than they used to be, or if they are more frequent than they were,” Teagle says. “I just question all of that.”
Vaccines for COVID-19 and flu aren’t among those required for school enrollment, though they have been in the headlines recently as federal vaccine advisers adjust their guidelines for the shots.
Goldhagen blames the falling rates for school-required vaccines on politics, saying the politicization of science can have devastating results. He warns that unvaccinated children are at extreme risk.
“We’re seeing that with measles, we’re seeing that with whooping cough. We will soon see that with diseases that are as obscure, in a sense, as polio. Many of the diseases that are vaccine-preventable, like pneumococcal pneumonia, pneumococcal meningitis, H. flu (Haemophilus influenzae), meningitis, which we can prevent, which we vaccinate against, we’ll see a resurgence of those. Many kids will die,” Goldhagen says.
Goldhagen says he’s worried about the health of Florida youth, offering this advice to parents unsure of what vaccines they can trust.
”Talk to your pediatrician. Talk to your family doctor. Do not rely on information that comes from the internet,” he says. “Your pediatrician is 100% committed to the health and well-being of your child.”
