Florida is no longer publishing vaccination rates for individual public school campuses, leaving the public without a key piece of information to protect children as state leaders say they intend to end longstanding requirements for students to get shots.
While vaccination data is still available county by county, the state’s failure to provide more localized numbers could mask geographic pockets where immunization rates are particularly low, putting people in those areas at risk from an outbreak, public health experts say.
“When it comes to vaccine-preventable diseases, what really matters is the community that your child is in every day,” said Jason Salemi, a professor at the University of South Florida’s Department of Epidemiology, explaining the value of school-level vaccination data