A record 155,000 kindergarten families claimed exemptions from school vaccine requirements last year, and the only thing the establishment press finds alarming is that parents are daring to decide for themselves.
Federal data released Monday shows the exemption rate climbed to 4.2% for the 2025-2026 school year, up from 3.6% the year before — the fourth consecutive record high. The vast majority of those exemptions are nonmedical, meaning parents are making a deliberate choice, not acting on a doctor's order. Exemptions rose in 41 states and the District of Columbia.
Both the Chicago Tribune and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution covered the same CDC data. Both framed the trend as a problem. The Tribune leaned hardest into blame, pointing directly at Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump for sowing what the American Academy of Pediatrics' Dr. James Campbell called "chaos and confusion in vaccination recommendation systems." The AJC ran the same AP wire with the same guilt-by-association framing.
What neither outlet paused to consider: maybe parents aren't confused. Maybe they're making a calculated decision about their own children.
The Tribune noted that MMR vaccination rates fell to 92.4% from a pre-pandemic 95% — the threshold public health officials say prevents disease clusters. Rates also dipped for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, and chickenpox. The country is also experiencing its worst measles year since 1991, with more than a quarter-million kindergarteners now susceptible.
Those are facts worth knowing. They are not arguments for stripping parents of their right to choose.
North Carolina Health Secretary Dev Sangvai called vaccination "both a shared responsibility and a shared goal." There's the tell. Shared means mandatory, and goal means the state decides. Bodily autonomy was a progressive rallying cry for decades — until it was your child and a government-mandated needle. Then suddenly the same crowd demanding "my body, my choice" insists the state knows best.
The Tribune also noted, almost in passing, that the CDC under the Trump administration has stopped releasing this data through its flagship Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and that agency officials are no longer speaking to the trends. That's a transparency problem, and one worth watching. The public deserves the data. What it doesn't deserve is to be told there's only one permissible conclusion to draw from it.
The real story isn't that exemption rates are rising. It's that after years of government mandates, corporate pressure, and media scolding, parents are still pushing back — and the number is growing.
