Washington has highest vaccine opt-out rate in country

Washington has the highest rate in the country of students exempted from school-required vaccines, a federal report released Thursday has found.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 6.2 percent of Washington kindergartners had a parent waiver for at least one required vaccine last year.

That rate has more than doubled in the last 10 years. The average national exemption rate was about 2 percent, state officials said. Mississippi and Tennessee had the lowest exemption rates of less than 1 percent, the study found.

Vaccines are a major concern for health officials, who are trying to meet vaccination goals while containing the country's largest measles outbreak in 15 years. Washington is among the states involved, with two recent measles cases in Clark County and one in Kitsap County.

The CDC does not show which state has the lowest overall vaccination coverage. Relying on data from the last school year, it shows that immunization of Washington kindergarteners ranged from 88 percent to 93 percent for required vaccines. They include polio, whooping cough, measles, hepatitis B, and chickenpox.

Those rates fell in the middle of vaccination rates of other states. They also fell below a state and national goal of 95 percent of all kindergarteners to be vaccinated.

Washington has long been known for its big pockets of unvaccinated people, such as in Vashon Island, but the federal report was the first to rank vaccination waiver rates of all states.

"All parents want their kids to have a healthy start," state Secretary of Health Mary Selecky said in a statement Thursday.

"Making sure they have all of their immunizations before going to school is one of the best ways to keep them healthy. Kids who aren't fully immunized aren't fully protected."

Last month, the state began targeting the large number of unvaccinated kids, with a new law requiring parents who want a vaccination waiver to show proof that a health provider gave them information on immunizations.

Visit seattlepi.com's home page for more Seattle news. Contact Vanessa Ho at 206-448-8003 or vanessaho@seattlepi.com, and follow her on Twitter as @vanessaho.