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More Oregon parents are opting out of vaccines for their young children, the Oregon Health Authority reported Thursday, as the state’s rate of nonmedical exemptions for required school vaccines for kindergarteners climbed to a record high.
In the school year ending in 2026, 10.9% of Oregon kindergarteners had nonmedical exemptions for a school-required vaccine. This is up from 6.9% as recently as 2022.
“Although the vast majority of families in Oregon are still choosing to protect families through vaccination, the downward trends are deeply concerning,” Howard Chiou, the OHA’s medical director for communicable diseases and immunizations, said in a written statement. “We risk seeing the return of diseases such as measles and polio—diseases of the past that once caused widespread harm but are entirely preventable with vaccines.”
Indeed, the new data shows that 85.6% of Oregon kindergarteners were up to date on their vaccines this year. But the rate has been dropping for some time now. A decade ago, OHA put the rate at nearly 90%.
The agency cites guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics that 92% to 94% of the population needs to be immune to measles, through vaccination or previous infection, to prevent or limit the spread of infections in a community.
In 2026, the vaccine with the highest rate of kindergarten nonmedical exemptions is the second dose of the measles vaccine—at 9.4%, up from 4.9% 10 years ago. The OHA press release noted that Measles is one of the most contagious diseases in the world, and the best way to prevent infection is to get vaccinated.
The vaccine with the second highest rate of kindergarten nonmedical exemptions is the DTaP vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough). Pertussis rates in Oregon hit a 75-year high in 2025.
The OHA warns of “pockets of risk” in individual schools, and the data varies quite a bit by county. Where, for example, the agency found that 25% of kindergarteners in sparsely-populated Wheeler County had a nonmedical exemption for a school mandated vaccine (up from 6% in 2022), 4.9% of Multnomah kindergarteners had such an exemption (up from 3.1% in 2022).
While nonmedical exemption rates for kindergarteners have been rising nationwide, Oregon has long had a far higher-than-average rate. And data reported by the Oregon Journalism Project shows that it has been trending upward far faster here in recent years than the rest of the U.S.
