Back-to-school season is a critical opportunity to focus on one of the most effective strategies to keep children safe and healthy: routine immunizations. Childhood vaccination is one of the lowest-cost and most effective strategies to control and prevent disease over a person’s lifespan. In economic terms, researchers estimate that every dollar spent on childhood vaccination saves more than $10 in societal costs and $3 in direct medical savings. It’s no coincidence that August was National Immunization Awareness Month. This back-to-school season, state policymakers and school leaders should enforce school vaccine requirements and engage communities in immunization campaigns to catch kids up on these important vaccines.
Unfortunately, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of routine childhood immunization have declined due to difficulties in accessing health care, vaccine hesitancy and the loosening of vaccine requirements. These put children and communities at greater risk of outbreaks of preventable disease.
The above excerpt was originally published in The 74.
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