SC childhood immunization rates have dropped since COVID. How it affects your child

Over the past 18 months, the rates of many respiratory illnesses plummeted as people stayed home or wore masks to avoid contracting COVID-19.

However, now that society has largely opened back up, large numbers of children whose parents delayed taking them for routine medical visits and skipped their immunizations are at risk of contracting once-common childhood illnesses like measles that vaccines had virtually eliminated.

Dr. Deborah Greenhouse, a pediatrician affiliated with Prisma Health Children’s Hospital and past president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that doctor’s offices are now filling with young children who have contracted non-COVID-19 respiratory illnesses.

“We’re in a completely different scenario,” than we were early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Greenhouse said Monday during a press briefing at Prisma Health Children’s Hospital in Columbia, where health experts pushed the importance of routine vaccinations.

While there are still plenty of children coming down with COVID-19, many are now arriving at doctor’s offices with respiratory syncytial virus, croup and hand, foot and mouth disease, she said.

“We’re seeing all kinds of other things pop up that now are crowding our offices, crowding the emergency rooms, crowding the floors, crowding the intensive care units,” Greenhouse said. “And we have to pay attention to all of that because as we see this uptick in COVID and as we relax some of the things we’ve been doing, it starts to affect everybody.”

She said misinformation on social media has contributed to an unprecedented level of society-wide skepticism about immunizations, but attributes the drop in routine vaccinations in South Carolina to the fear of getting COVID-19, not general anti-vaccine sentiment.

“There was just this incredible, off-the-cliff drop off at the beginning of the pandemic in our well visits, and the immunizations went off the cliff at the same time,” Greenhouse said. “I don’t think there was really any general anti-vax sentiment, although certainly there is anti-COVID vax sentiment throughout the state that we are working so hard to combat. The drop off in general immunizations absolutely is due to the pandemic.”

With school starting up again in a couple weeks, outbreaks of diseases like measles and whooping cough are more likely to spread among children who aren’t up to date on their vaccinations, she said.

“We send the kids back to school without a high immunization rate against whooping cough, we’re going to see it a whole lot more,” Greenhouse said. “All of those diseases potentially can come back.”

Dr. Anna Kathryn Rye Burch, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Prisma Health Children’s Hospital, said a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses could occur in South Carolina if immunization rates drop so much that it affects herd immunity to those diseases.

“The problem with children being behind on their vaccines and others being behind on their vaccines is that lowers that herd immunity,” she said. “It allows other viruses to come in and take hold of a situation where before we were all protected against because the majority of the population was vaccinated against that.”

Greenhouse couldn’t provide data on just how much lower immunization rates are for children than they were prior to the pandemic, but said at one point they were down more than 50% among South Carolina Medicaid patients.

While that’s no longer the case, she said, immunizations remain reduced across the board, especially among adolescents.

“The more of us get vaccinated against COVID, the more of us get vaccinated against everything else that we have vaccines accessible for, the better off we’re all going to be and the easier it will be for us to move past the pandemic and get to the other side with our children being healthy,” Greenhouse said.