From WisPolitics.com/WisBusiness.com …
— Wisconsin’s childhood vaccination rate had its largest year-over-year decline in five years, falling nearly 2% in 2025.
Health officials today rolled out the latest state vaccination figures, showing 66.9% of two-year-olds got all doses of the recommended childhood vaccination series last year. That’s a decline of 1.9 percentage points from the prior year’s 68.8%.
While this rate has fallen from the recent peak of 72.9% in 2017, it had been holding relatively steady in recent years, dipping just 0.1 percentage points from 2021-2024. Last year’s larger drop was the biggest decline since 2019-2020, when the childhood vaccination rate fell by 2.2 percentage points to 69.9%.
Following the pattern for the full recommended vaccination series, the rate for the vaccine that protects against the measles virus also had a larger dip last year.
From 2021 to 2024, the two-year-old vaccination rate for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine had fallen only 0.2 percentage points to 81.4%. But in 2025, that declined by 1.6 percentage points to 79.8%, marking the first time that rate was below 80% in at least a dozen years.
Stephanie Schauer, who manages the Wisconsin Immunization Program, notes measles is highly infectious and requires a high level of immunity within a given community to prevent the disease spreading when introduced.
“It’s upward of 95%,” Schauer said today during an online briefing. “Eighty percent is a pretty low bar, and it still is not quite where we need to be. It is something that we are concerned with as we continue to see that drop.”
The increase comes as health officials have identified at least two separate confirmed cases of measles in state residents this year, along with a pair of people traveling back to the state after being exposed to the virus. Last year’s outbreak in Oconto County resulted in 36 cases, all among unvaccinated people.
When asked about what may be driving vaccination declines, Schauer today pointed to accessibility challenges around vaccines, as well as “misinformation and disinformation” driving people to question or delay vaccinations.
See the release below and see more in a recent story from the Friday Report.
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