Fewer Nevada kindergartners are receiving life-saving early childhood vaccinations as vaccine exemption rates reach record highs, new federal data shows.
“We tend to be at the bottom of every good list and at the top of every bad list,” said Dr. Brian Labus, an infectious disease epidemiologist and associate professor at the UNLV School of Public Health. “We have some of the lowest rates of immunization in the country. We have some of the highest rates of exemptions going into school.”
The 2025-26 school year saw Nevada kindergarten vaccination coverage rates for three of five core vaccines fall to new lows not seen in over a decade, according to data released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Coverage rates for shots that prevent chickenpox, hepatitis B, measles, mumps and rubella are the lowest they have been in Nevada since at least the 2011-12 school year, which is as far back as the online CDC data goes. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children receive all doses of these five core vaccines before they turn 7 to inoculate them against potentially deadly diseases.
According to Labus, this is the most vulnerable children have been to preventable diseases in decades.
“Vaccines have been a victim of their own success. We did such a great job with vaccination that nobody gets polio. People weren’t getting measles. Your kids don’t get mumps in school,” Labus said. “Kids don’t even get chickenpox anymore, so parents aren’t seeing these diseases every day.”
Lower rates in Nevada
CDC data shows that statewide hepatitis B vaccine coverage in kindergartners is now only 92 percent, while MMR and chickenpox coverage have fallen from a high of 96 percent in 2020 to around 91 and 90 percent, respectively.
Health officials aim for a 95 percent vaccination coverage rate for measles to achieve herd immunity, according to Shannon Pickering, a community health nurse manager with the Southern Nevada Health District. The Mayo Clinic says herd immunity makes it harder for diseases to spread through a population by limiting the number of people who can catch the illness.
“We know that the rates are below that, so if there were an outbreak, then that’s a higher chance that we would see more children and adults — anybody that hasn’t been vaccinated — we would see the spread of the disease in our area,” Pickering said.
Vaccination coverage to curb polio, as well as diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, are both down to about 90 percent — the lowest rate since the 2016-17 school year, according to the CDC. Coverage for the polio and DTaP vaccines peaked at about 98 and 97 percent, respectively, in the 2011-12 school year.
Medical and religious exemptions are easy for Nevada parents to get, Labus said.
Medical exemptions require authorization and a signature from the child’s pediatrician. Religious exemptions need to be submitted annually and don’t require any sign off from a medical professional. However, for non-medical exemptions, parents must acknowledge that if an outbreak occurs, their child will be excluded from school or childcare until the risk passes.
Among those parents opting their kids out of vaccinations is Las Vegas mother Nubia Lopez, who said her life experiences have given her pause about inoculating her four children.
Lopez recalled having severe symptoms of waist-down paralysis, a high fever and body aches in the days after receiving the human papillomavirus vaccine as a 13-year-old. “It was really scary,” Lopez said. “Just not being able to walk freaked me out. I never forgot about it.”
Lopez’s oldest son, now 13 and attending school online, developed similar paralysis symptoms whenever he got fevers after he received the standard slate of early childhood vaccinations, she said. Lopez stopped immunizing him when he turned 9 as a result.
Though doctors never told her the symptoms and vaccinations were correlated in either instance, Lopez said, “because of the side effect I had, I couldn’t ignore that it was a possibility.”
These experiences led Lopez to delay her oldest daughter’s vaccine schedule, she said. But at 15 months, her daughter, now 8, had developed absence seizure symptoms where she would stare into space and not respond to her surroundings.
Lopez said she believed the symptoms were linked to the MMR vaccine that her daughter received less than a day before the symptoms began.
Lopez, who doesn’t have any formal medical education, said she has now opted out of all vaccinations for her two youngest children, aged 6 and 2.
“Do I think all vaccines are bad? No. I just think that we are all different,” Lopez said. “It would only make sense that what is fine for one person won’t necessarily be fine with other people.”
Lopez said her 8- and 6-year-old currently attend a Las Vegas charter school on medical and non-medical vaccine exemptions, respectively.
She believes that the odds her unvaccinated kids get potentially deadly diseases is smaller than their odds of experiencing negative side effects from the vaccines.
“If a doctor told me, ‘I guarantee you that this vaccine is safe and nothing is going to happen to your kids …’ I would absolutely consider it,” Lopez said. “But they can’t do that.”
Medical experts: Vaccines are safe
Vaccines are incredibly safe, effective and rigorously tested, according to Labus. He notes that children get vaccinated at an age where other, unrelated health issues often appear.
“You could say, ‘I got the vaccine, and then this happened,’” Labus said. “But just because they happened in order, doesn’t mean there’s a cause-and-effect relationship.”
A decrease in vaccination rates not only impacts individual unvaccinated children, but it also weakens herd immunity, according to Pickering.
“If there’s a larger outbreak, it also would cause disruption in school,” Pickering said. “There could be temporary closures, quarantines. Students that were not vaccinated may be excluded from attending school during the periods of an outbreak because they don’t have the protection that they need.”
Pickering recommends that parents talk to their pediatricians to educate themselves on vaccines.
Immunization coalition
In response to the decrease in vaccination, Labus founded NVax, a Nevada immunization coalition, alongside Sara Conners, a UNLV School of Public Health graduate student studying epidemiology and bio-statistics. NVax first launched in April 2026 with the goal of protecting Nevadans against preventable diseases through community outreach, education and vaccination events.
According to Labus and Conners, a major factor in the growing distrust in vaccinations is the way that parents consume information about vaccines. Parents in their 20s and 30s are more likely to consume information about vaccines through social media, rather than through the news like previous generations, Labus said.
“Misinformation is usually fear-based,” Conners said. “People have concerns and they want to keep their kids safe, but we also want them to keep their kids safe.”
Contact Kalohe Danbara at kdanbara@reviewjournal.com. Contact Spencer Levering at slevering@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253.
