Back-to-school jabs
Here’s what to know about vaccinations as classes resume
Sara Moniuszko
USA Today
As kids head back to school, vaccine confusion is everywhere. So what do families need to know?
President Donald Trump signed an executive order “calling for more vaccine flexibility and research” and fewer childhood vaccinations months after trying to slash the childhood vaccine schedule. A federal judge blocked some of these changes in March.
Meanwhile, U.S. kindergarten vaccination coverage fell again in the 2025-2026 school year, continuing a mostly downward trend since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
And stalled vaccine advisory committee meetings left Americans in even more immunization guidance limbo as we enter the fall.
Still, health experts say vaccinations are essential for student safety.
“Back-to-school immunizations matter more in 2026 than they have in decades,” Dr. Julia Rosebush, an associate professor and pediatric infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Chicago said during an Aug. 21 news briefing organized by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “As we send children back to the classroom this year, here is the bottom line: Routine vaccinations are proven to be safe and effective at preventing diseases with high rates of morbidity and mortality.”
Here’s what else to know.
COVID-19, flu
Updated flu and COVID vaccines will be available this season, Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt Health and spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, adding the medical insurance industry has said “they would cover those vaccines.”
“Parents can still choose to give their children all of the vaccinations if they wish,” Trump said Aug. 10 before signing his order. “They will be covered by insurance.”
The official CDC webpage for the flu, last updated in September 2025, still recommends the flu vaccine for “everyone 6 months and older in the United States, with rare exception.”
The most effective way to prevent serious illness from the flu is vaccination, according to the World Health Organization, CDC and other leading medical institutions. The CDC especially recommends the vaccine for people at higher risk, which includes those over 65, children younger than 2, pregnant women and people with underlying health issues ranging from asthma to obesity.
The CDC also generally recommends the vaccines be given from September to November, before cold and flu season kicks off, “ideally by October.”
Measles
The U.S. is experiencing its worst measles resurgence in more than three decades, putting the nation at risk of losing its measles elimination status.
While recent declines in vaccination coverage may sound like a “small shift,” Rosebush said, measles is “one of the most contagious diseases we know.”
“A single unvaccinated child in a school full of unvaccinated classmates can start an outbreak that spreads to dozens of families within days,” she explained. “The measles, mumps, rubella, or MMR vaccine … is safe, effective and remains our single best tool to stop this outbreak.”
At least two people died of measles in Pennsylvania, the state’s health department said Aug. 25, noting both were unvaccinated.
Whooping cough
Pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough, is another concern.
According to health professionals, declining vaccination rates, declining immunity and slow public health monitoring systems are the main causes of the most recent increase in cases. According to Johns Hopkins, 2025 saw the greatest number of whooping cough cases since 2012.
“Pertussis can circulate quietly in schools or infect older adults whose immunity has waned and can be devastating for infants who are too young to be fully vaccinated themselves,” Rosebush explained.
Rates decline
U.S. kindergarten vaccination coverage fell 0.1% during the 2025-2026 school year, according to CDC data.
Coverage ranged from 92% for the diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis vaccine (DTaP) to 92.4% for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and the polio vaccine, the CDC said.
The CDC said coverage for the MMR, DTaP, polio and varicella vaccines decreased in more than half the states from the previous year.
“It’s continuing a long trend in the wrong direction,” said John Grabenstein, a pharmacist who previously ran the Department of Defense’s vaccine programs for troops and their families.
“Changes in federal guidance, and especially the recent executive order, have really muddied the waters and made it very difficult for people and families to find trustworthy information on vaccines,” Infectious Diseases Society of America CEO Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo said.
She added that medical societies “remain committed to reviewing the evidence base and to providing patients and physicians with evidence-based recommendations.”
Inside Moderna, Merck’s cancer vaccine breakthrough
Michael Erman and Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, was at a Lebanese restaurant celebrating a friend’s birthday late on Aug. 13 when he got the call.
An mRNA cancer vaccine the company had been developing with Merck had hit its mark — the first success of a therapeutic cancer vaccine in late-stage testing after more than 100 years of failed attempts.
Cancer experts hailed it as the beginning of an era of custom-made vaccines that train the immune system to fight an individual patient’s cancer. In a trial of more than 1,000 patients with localized melanoma, the vaccine kept tumors from coming back or spreading.
With full trial details pending, Wall Street is already estimating billions of dollars in sales.
Bancel likened news from that call to the day in late 2020 that Moderna announced its COVID19 vaccine trial results.
“It was a moment that we’d worked really hard toward. We knew what was at stake for the planet with COVID,” Bancel said in an interview. It’s the same with cancer, he said, adding that the disease touches nearly everybody at some point.
That moment of joy was brief. “I went right away into, ‘OK, what are all the things we have to do?’”
For Dean Li, president of Merck Research Laboratories, it was largely the same. When Eliav Barr, Merck’s head of global clinical development, called Li, he already had a list of urgent tasks: ready the data for presentation at an international cancer meeting, turn to the U.S. FDA review, and apply the study’s strengths to other ongoing trials.
“It isn’t hallelujah,” Li recalls. “It’s boom.”
For Merck and Moderna, it was a moment built over 10 years, according to eight current and former company executives.
When they announced a partnership in 2016 to develop a cancer vaccine, the companies had been working for over a year on a separate vaccine venture.
For the cancer collaboration, Merck paid $200 million upfront in 2016 and another $250 million in 2022. The companies share costs and profits.
At that time, Merck’s Keytruda was emerging as a powerhouse in a new class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors that could unleash the immune system to fight cancers by removing a natural brake.
“What Keytruda taught the world was that, yes, there is an immune recognition of cancer, but cancer is clever in putting up barriers, and Keytruda removes those barriers,” Merck’s Barr said during an interview in late May.
Next, he said, companies, including Merck, looked for ways to further rev up the immune system, testing Keytruda with next-generation immunotherapy drugs such as TIGIT inhibitors. “It didn’t work,” Barr said.
Tal Zaks, who served as Moderna’s chief medical officer from 2015-2021, immigrated to the U.S. from Israel in 1996 to work on cancer vaccines at the National Cancer Institute.
“We failed back then, and we failed for many years,” Zaks said.
But he thought new technologies based on mRNA plus checkpoint inhibitors, as well as cheaper genetic sequencing, might open a path toward success.
Moderna had the mRNA technology, but as a young company, expensive cancer trials were out of reach.
Bancel said Moderna spoke with companies that had checkpoint inhibitors, but knew Merck well and was swayed by its experience mounting Keytruda trials.
Keytruda, which Merck’s Li calls a “miracle drug,” is used against 20 different kinds of cancerous tumors and 45 types and stages of cancer. But exactly what aspects of the tumor the drug targets, and why some patients respond better than others, remains a mystery.
Messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, is present in every cell of the body. Its job is to carry genetic instructions from the cell nucleus to parts that make specific proteins.
The vaccine, known as intismeran autogene, trains the immune system to attack cancer cells by targeting mutations unique to each patient’s tumors.
Prior cancer vaccines that attempted to train the immune system to target one or two specific tumor mutations failed.
The companies decided to test the vaccine in melanoma, which has among the highest number of mutations of any cancer and against which checkpoint inhibitors had a record of success.
They also decided to test it in patients with early-stage melanoma following surgical removal of their tumors. That gave the companies critical time to create a customized vaccine based on a patient’s tumor and additional time for their immune systems to respond.
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