By Jennifer Pignolet, jpignolet@detroitnews.com
Childhood vaccination rates in Michigan are continuing to fall as the state remains one of several in the country that allows for exemptions for personal reasons, as well as religious and medical ones, the state’s medical expert on Tuesday told the State Board of Education.
But Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, got pushback from the eight-member board’s two Republicans, who questioned the safety of vaccines.
Following the meeting, Bagdasarian called the conversation “robust,” but noted, “I didn’t necessarily feel that the conversation that we had today about vaccines really centered the needs of children.”
Bagdasarian told the board the state’s rate of children ages 19-35 months receiving all their required vaccinations to enroll in school has continued to drop to 68.4%.
That’s down over a percentage point from January 2023, when the rate was 69.6%, and down 10 points from 2017, when the rate was 75.4%.
“Many of the vaccines I’ve talked about today are vaccines that we got as kids, many of our parents got them as kids, and these are vaccines that have eliminated diseases in our country like polio,” Bagdasarian said during the meeting. “We no longer have kids who are living in iron lungs because of the polio vaccine. We no longer have kids dying in the kind of numbers we did (from measles) due to the measles vaccine.”
Measles has been on the rebound nationwide, she said, with three deaths this year, and many more cases. One in five children with measles will be hospitalized, Bagdasarian said. One case could shut down an entire school.
The majority of counties in Michigan also now have early childhood vaccination rates below 70%.
In 2017, just nine counties had vaccination rates at 70% or below. In 2024, 51 of the state’s 83 counties were below that threshold.
Rates of kindergarteners and seventh graders having all their vaccinations are higher, Bagdasarian noted, with 89.8% of kindergarteners receiving all their shots and 90.8% of seventh graders being up-to-date on their vaccinations. But both those figures are down from about 93-94% before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Still, Bagdasarian said, the numbers show that requirements for vaccines by kindergarten, even with multiple ways to opt-out, work to increase rates. The data shows that many children who are behind on immunizations in their early years are getting up-to-date on their vaccinations in time for kindergarten.
Bagdasarian said the numbers overall dropped significantly during the pandemic, which was understandable because fewer children were getting regular medical checkups. But it was concerning, she said, that the numbers have not rebounded since the pandemic and have instead gotten worse.
The state’s chief medical officer received pushback from the board’s two conservative members, Nikki Snyder and Tom McMillan, who questioned the safety of vaccines overall.
Snyder asked Bagdasarian why there had never been a scientific study on people “for their entire lifespan” who receive vaccinations every year. Bagdasarian said it wouldn’t be feasible and was irrelevant to the presentation, which focused on childhood vaccinations.
“So, in acknowledging that there is no science to back up the safety of annual vaccination recommendations, and the trend that you’re sharing with us today regarding childhood vaccinations, do you think people should feel safe with your recommendation to get annual vaccinations when there is no science or evidence to back it up?” asked Snyder, a Dexter Republican.
Bagdasarian reiterated that nothing in her presentation dealt with annual vaccines. She confirmed she does recommend the annual flu shot.
In an interview after the meeting, Bagdasarian said there would be no way to do a “lifespan” study, noting it would take multiple decades, and there would be no way to have control groups where one is told never to get a vaccine, and the other gets one or more annually.
“That’s not how scientific data is collected,” she said.
State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko, in his first meeting as superintendent and the first time running the board meeting, attempted to redirect the focus to the childhood vaccinations following Snyder’s comments.
“I get my flu vaccine every year,” Maleyko said. “I’m a proponent of vaccines. I think it’s worked for my children. I also support individual rights for their children and their family, and they can make their individual choices with them and their doctors and physicians. But there is also, you know, a lot of research on helpful vaccines, and so I think she’s answered that. Appreciate your statement, and I’ll move on to Mr. Bullock, who now has the floor.”
Board member Marshall Bullock II, a Democrat, then said he was going to say the same thing and asked Bagdasarian to reiterate how vaccines reduce the rates of diseases and hospital admissions.
McMillin brought the conversation to the pandemic and recommendations that were made at the time on masking that were later changed. Bagdasarian noted the recommendations were based on facts known at the time.
“I’m just trying to show that sometimes the experts are wrong,” McMillin said. “And so I think that’s important for the whole discussion.”
Bagdasarian said after the meeting that vaccine misinformation spread at an “alarming rate through the pandemic.”
“This is something that used to be more of a fringe movement, and now it seems to be very mainstream,” she said. “I think that for parents, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to really figure out who to trust and who to get your information from.”
Every parent wants to make the best decision for their child, she said, and should ask questions.
“But some of the discourse that’s happened in some places like committees and board rooms don’t seem to maybe have that same purity of intent,” Bagdasarian said.
The conversation came days after a controversial move by a federal vaccine advisory committee, which voted last week to end the longstanding recommendation that all U.S. babies get the hepatitis B vaccine on the day they are born. In June, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the entire 17-member vaccine advisory panel and replaced it with a group that includes several anti-vaccine voices.
Vaccine advocates have decried the move, saying it puts children in danger of contracting a preventable disease.
Asked in the meeting about her feelings on the changing recommendations, Bagdasarian said the state is continuing to recommend the shot for all newborns.
“We know that birth dose saves lives,” the chief medical executive said. “And so our recommendation is to continue on.”
Bagdasarian said she believes the uncertainty will cause additional harm beyond just the one vaccine rate possibly dropping.
“I think that the more confusion and the more chaos and controversy is created around vaccines, the more we’ll see this trickle over into other things,” she said. “And so it becomes not just about that hepatitis B birth dose, but maybe the hepatitis B vaccine at all, and then an overflow onto other childhood immunizations. And so I do worry that that controversy that was created without scientific backup is going to overflow and cause those rates to go down across the board.”
Board President Pamela Pugh said the controversy was “contrived or made up by, I can say it, for political reason.” The Saginaw Democrat cautioned against listening to “sidewalk counselors” instead of the experts.
“Always come to the people who are responsible and who know the information,” Pugh said. “We have a lot of sidewalk counselors, even at this table, that we have to be careful of because we see it showing up in those trends, and unfortunately, those trends don’t just stop at who’s getting vaccinated, but you showed how it ends up in health outcomes as well. And some of them are resulting in death of young people, very preventable diseases and deaths.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
