Coverage for two doses of varicella vaccine among kindergarten students was highest in Mississippi and lowest in the District of Columbia, said Ranee Seither and associates at the National Center of Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta.
For the 2016-2017 school year, 99.4% of Mississippi children enrolled in kindergarten received the state-required two doses of varicella vaccine, compared with 84.6% in D.C. The median was 93.8% for the 42 states that require two doses and 96.5% for those 42 plus the 7 states that reported and only require one dose. Oklahoma and Wyoming “did not report data because of widespread problems with the quality of data reported by schools,” the CDC investigators wrote (MMWR 2017;66[40]:1073-80).
The data for the CDC analysis, which included 3,973,172 kindergartners for the 2016-2017 school year, were collected by federally funded immunization programs in the 50 states and D.C.