Seattle media outlets are misleading you on declining vaccination rates among K-12 students in Washington. Whether it’s a result of their bias or unintentionally disinterested journalism, it doesn’t matter because the end result is the same: you’re not getting the full picture.
Seattle Times and Fox 13 splashed headlines about vaccination rates “dropping again,” and kindergarten vaccines “falling,” as if Washington suddenly turned into an anti-vax bunker. In The Seattle Times, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is implicitly blamed for the dip, noting it “coincides with growing anti-vaccine sentiment throughout the country.” Fox 13 tells viewers that kindergarten vaccination “fell more than 4% compared to the 2020–2021 school year,” implying it’s to blame for a small number of local measles cases.
But what neither highlight: they’re comparing today’s numbers to a COVID-era peak — an artificial high point created by extraordinary mandates and compliance pushes, plus fear — not to the normal, pre-pandemic baseline. By that measure, statewide vaccination is still higher than normal, which makes the “down” framing misleading at best and manipulative at worst.
Vaccination rates are hardly ‘down’ the way Seattle media claims
Vaccination rates are not “down” in the traditional sense. We’re headed back to normal. This is exactly where vaccination rates were before COVID hysteria artificially inflated the numbers. Pretending otherwise is a classic case of cherry-picking data to fit a preferred narrative…