Vaccination rates for a group of seven childhood diseases that public health experts recommend in the first two years after birth fell to 66.9% in 2025. In 2024, the rate was 68.8%, according to the Department of Health Services.
“While nearly seven out of every 10 children had the recommended vaccines in this series by 24 months of age, we know that three out of 10 kids did not,” said Stephanie Schauer, who manages the Wisconsin immunization program for DHS. That’s a decline of almost 2 percentage points — about 1,200 children, she said at an online press briefing Monday.
“We use data like this as an alert system,” said Paula Tran, state health officer and administrator at the DHS Division of Public Health, said in a DHS statement. “Today that alert system is sending a clear signal that the health and well-being of Wisconsin kids and communities are at risk.”
Details of vaccination rates for children and adolescents are published on the Department of Health Services website.
In 2025, 79.8% of children 2 or younger were fully vaccinated against measles — dropping below 80% for the first time. In 2013, 88.2% of Wisconsin 2-year-olds were fully vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, which protects against mumps and rubella as well as measles.
“Measles is a very infectious disease and really requires a very high level of immunity in a community such that it won’t spread,” Schauer. “So it is something that we are concerned with as we continue to see that drop.”
Measles outbreaks have been popping up across the country in the last year especially. The MMR vaccination rate in Wisconsin has been slowly but steadily declining over the last dozen years, and last year it fell by 1.6 percentage points from 2024.
“That’s headed in the wrong direction. We need more children protected, not fewer,” Schauer said. “We really need to be closer up around 95% of a community protected so that we don’t have an outbreak if measles is introduced into a community.”
With spring break coming soon and with it travel plans, the health department is also encouraging families to review their children’s measles immunization records, Schauer said, because most recent measles outbreaks and clusters across the country “are due to individuals who have been traveling where measles is occurring and then bringing them back.”
There have been some positive trends, Schauer said. In contrast to most other vaccine types, the rates of vaccine against meningitis — which is given in adolescence — have been increasing over the last decade and the last couple of years in particular.
She attributed the increase both to increased awareness and to the health department’s addition of the vaccine in 2024 to the list of required shots for students going into grades 7 and 12. Previous attempts to add the meningitis vaccine to the required list were blocked by the Republican majority on the state Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules.
With more families asking about the meningitis vaccine and more doctors talking about it with their patients, “that shows that school immunization requirements can and do help ensure that our kids are protected,” Schauer said
Schauer said there are two broad reasons for the decrease in vaccinations: public mistrust and lack of access.
“We understand that there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there, that maybe people are questioning vaccines, or they may be delaying or spreading vaccines out,” she said.
To overcome mistrust, the state health department looks to health care providers to serve as the best messengers to the families in their care. Research has shown that 86% of the public “had a fair degree of confidence in their primary health care providers to provide them information on public health matters, and that would include vaccines,” Schauer said.
“We continue to recognize that parents have questions, and that’s appropriate and OK, but we want to make sure that they’re getting those questions answered,” Schauer said.
The message to families is to encourage them to turn to their health providers with questions, she added, “so that they can feel reassured that providing vaccines is really the most safe and effective way of preventing some of these really nasty diseases.”
Others, however, may lack any information at all about vaccines, have difficulty getting access to them because they lack regular access to health care.
Vaccines for Children, a program in place for more than 30 years, is intended to make it possible for families whose health care is covered by Medicaid or who have no insurance or inadequate insurance to get the vaccines they need, Schauer said. The program is also available to Alaska Native and American Indian children.
DHS lists providers across the state who participate in the Vaccines for Children program. More than 720 pharmacies and other providers take part, and the department continues to recruit more.
“We don’t want any children to go without vaccines because they weren’t aware of this program,” Schauer said.
DHS also funds 25 community organizations and tribal health departments in a program to make connections in their communities. Those agencies are “the trusted messenger and talking about vaccines and vaccine safety and why they are important in their communities,” she said.
