U.S. Sees A 22% Drop in Measles Vaccination

Written by Jon Fleetwood on January 8, 2026. Posted in Current News

The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles—the number mainstream vaccine devotees say is needed to achieve so-called “herd immunity”—has dropped from 50 percent before Covid to 28 percent, according to a Washington Post (WaPo) examination of public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia

At least 5.2 million kindergarten-age American children live in counties where vaccination rates for classrooms have fallen below the herd immunity threshold, up from about 3.5 million before the pandemic.

Not a single county in Idaho, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, or Wisconsin meets the mainstream-determined herd immunity threshold.

Most of the counties that previously bucked the herd immunity requirement for kindergarten classrooms became even more stalwart in their refusal of measles-related pharmaceutical injections, according to WaPo’s analysis.

The Post also found that schools have become less authoritarian in enforcing vaccination mandates.

School officials say their highest priority in the wake of COVID lockdowns has been “ensuring students return to class, not enforcing inoculation requirements or encouraging shots.”

Per WaPo’s report:

“We don’t promote medical decisions,” said Jeremy Schmidt, superintendent of the Becker Public School District in Minnesota, part of a conservative county northwest of Minneapolis. Kindergarten vaccination rates at Sherburne County’s Becker Primary School have dropped from nearly 100 percent before the pandemic to 77 percent in the 2024-2025 school year.

Roughly a third of schools in Minnesota that responded to a state Department of Health survey of school nurses two years ago reported they don’t have a policy to refuse students entry without immunization records. Some told the state they had stopped doing so after the pandemic, with one school nurse saying: “Our community has been very hesitant since COVID-19. Many have voiced that they do not trust the CDC or Public Health officials any longer.”

Even Democrat-led cities saw declines.

St. Louis reported just 74 percent of kindergartners vaccinated against measles. A quarter of kindergartners in the Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, which includes the city of Monroe, are unvaccinated.

Minnesota boasted a 6.5 percent drop in vaccination rates since 2018.

Since the pandemic, the vaccination rate in Sherburne County, which includes Becker, has fallen by more than 12 percent, from near herd immunity in the 2018-2019 school year to 82 percent for the last school year.

There was a six percent vaccination rate drop among Chicago schools. Across states that offer non-medical vaccine exemptions, vaccination rates fell by three percent. States allowing personal exemptions saw a drop reaching 4.3 percent across 16 states.

Measles Vaccine Contains Live Virus That Can Infect Vaccinated Individuals & Spread to the Unvaccinated

JonFleetwood.com is exclusively keeping a growing list of recent troubling patterns linking measles infections to government-led MMR vaccination campaigns across North America:

• The MMR vaccine contains a live measles virus, according to the manufacturer.
• The live measles virus in the MMR vaccine is the product of gain-of-function (GOF) laboratory experiments, meaning it is deliberately engineered to enhance its ability to infect more human cells than the wild-type measles virus is able to, and may retain characteristics that enable transmission and replication in the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
• The live virus in the vaccine can be shed for weeks from the vaccinated, potentially infecting the unvaccinated. A 1995 CDC study found that 83% of vaccinated children had measles virus shed in their urine. An April 2012 publication in the peer-reviewed journal Paediatrics & Child Health reported a child was being investigated after developing a new-onset measles-type rash after receiving a measles vaccine, meaning the shot can cause disease in the vaccinated. Nucleic acid testing confirmed that a “vaccine-type measles virus was being shed in the [child’s] urine.” A 2014 study in Clinical Infectious Diseases confirms that vaccinated individuals can transmit measles to multiple contacts.
• There are no peer-reviewed studies that confirm the virus in the measles vaccine is less infectious or replicates less in humans than the wild-type virus found in nature, meaning health officials have no scientific basis for claiming the vaccine strain poses a lower transmission risk to the unvaccinated.
• The claim that many of these measles cases are from wild-type measles viruses and not the live virus in the vaccine is undermined by the fact that the PCR test used as evidence of wild-type infection is only reliable less than three percent of the time. Research in Access Microbiology highlights that standard PCR assays might not effectively distinguish between vaccine and wild-type strains. The CDC has confirmed that PCR tests often misinterpret measles vaccine virus infection as wild-type measles infection: “Inability of these testing panels to differentiate between measles virus causing illness and incidental detection of measles vaccine virus RNA can have significant public health reporting and response ramifications, potentially leading to misdiagnosis of measles virus infection,” writes CDC. BLAST analysis shows that the CDC’s measles RT-PCR forward primer, reverse primer, and fluorescent probe all have numerous perfect or near-perfect contiguous matches to the human genome (15–20 bases, up to 100 percent identity), meaning the assay can generate a positive PCR signal based on human genetic material rather than the measles virus itself.
• 95 percent of infants develop fever after measles vaccination, 16 percent develop more serious measles-like symptoms; and in 70 percent of vaccinated children with measles-like illness, health officials can not tell if the vaccine pathogen or a wild measles virus caused the illness, according (here) to the journal BMC Infectious Diseases.
• Measles outbreaks have followed government-led vaccination campaigns in Texas, Canada, and Hawaii, raising concerns of vaccine-caused infections.
• Texas administered 15,000 more measles vaccinations in 2025 compared to 2024. The state subsequently suffered a growing measles outbreak that surpassed the total number of cases reported across the entire United States the previous year.
• A 12-month-old girl in Michigan who was infected with measles had received an MMR vaccine.
• Southern New Mexico’s most populous and vaccinated county, Doña Ana, reported its first measles infection after the state nearly doubled its measles vaccination rate compared to 2024.
• Virginia’s first confirmed measles case in 2025 occurred in a child following state and local health officials issuing multiple public health announcements urging residents to get the MMR shot.
• Just weeks after the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) rolled out a “measles simulator dashboard” meant to pressure students and residents into receiving MMR vaccines, Illinois reported its first confirmed measles case of 2025.
• The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment recently confirmed a fifth case of measles in Colorado in 2025 in a Denver County adult resident with verified measles (MMR) vaccination records.
• In May 2025, Texas and New Mexico had the sharpest increase in measles vaccination—they also had the most measles cases.
• The Iowa Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reported a confirmed case of measles in central Iowa in an adult following a state-led MMR vaccination campaign, raising questions as to whether the efforts to boost vaccination rates led to the infection.
• Dallas’ first measles case was found in a “fully vaccinated” woman.

WaPo’s own reporting shows that post-COVID America has not only walked away from the mainstream herd-immunity vaccination model, but has done so deliberately, unevenly, and at scale—reshaping school enforcement, state policy, and public trust in ways that federal health authorities can no longer credibly ignore.

See more here substack.com

Header image: Dept of Pediatrics / University of Oxford

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