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IMAGE: Percent of children up-to-date with recommended childhood vaccine by age group - Texas, ImmTrac2, May 2010 to May 2020 view more
Credit: Texas A&M University
Despite expert recommendations that children continue to get regularly scheduled vaccines during the pandemic, vaccination rates have decreased in several states.
A new study by researchers from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health and several other research institutions looked at childhood immunization rates in Texas to see what effect the COVID-19 pandemic may have had on childhood immunizations in 2020. In the study, led by public health doctoral student Tasmiah Nuzhath and published in the journal
Despite expert recommendations that children continue to get regularly scheduled vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of vaccinations decreased in several states.
Researchers looked at childhood immunization rates in Texas to see what effect the COVID-19 pandemic may have had on childhood immunizations in 2020, using data from a statewide immunization registry to determine how immunization rates changed over a 10-year period for children at four age milestones: 1 month, 5 months, 16 months, and 24 months.
The researchers, led by Tasmiah Nuzhath, a public health doctoral student at Texas A&M University, also analyzed county-level data from 2019 and 2020 to compare rural and urban locations.