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Parents have hesitated to take children to doctors’ offices, but students will have to meet immunization requirements to attend school in the fall. Reopening schools, pre-K and day care centers safely this fall was always going to be a crucial part of resuming normal life in New York City, and a herculean challenge for the nation’s largest school system. On Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio raised alarms about an unexpected new hurdle: plummeting rates of childhood vaccinations as anxious parents have kept their children home — and away from doctors’ offices.
During the height of the pandemic, from March 23 to May 9, the number of vaccine doses administered to children dropped 63 percent compared with the same time last year, and by 91 percent for children older than 2, according to the city health department. The city is tentatively planning to reopen its 1,800 public schools in September, along with hundreds of day care sites. But children will not be able to start school and relieve their parents of home schooling and child care duties without shots to protect them against illnesses like measles and chickenpox.
In a typical year, about 98 percent of the city’s public school students are fully vaccinated. “The pieces unfortunately start to fit together in a way that should cause parents real concern,” Mr. de Blasio said in his daily news briefing. Unvaccinated children, he said, could be “at greater threat of contracting a disease that could then put them at a greater threat of contracting Covid.” That is especially urgent now, since New York is seeing a rare but alarming trend of children falling ill with what is being called pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, which appears to be related to the coronavirus and can cause serious illness...
