Routine childhood vaccinations are falling, and some regions are faring worse than others
Childhood vaccination rates have been falling across the country since the Covid pandemic, with some pockets seeing steep declines.
A sustained slide in routine child immunisation rates is raising alarm as data reveals under-vaccination of one-year-olds has spread from 11 to 53 regions, opening the door to more widespread infectious disease outbreaks.
From Adelaide city in South Australia to Fremantle in Western Australia, Noosa in Queensland and Bankstown in southwestern Sydney, vaccination rates that should be close to 95 per cent have dropped below 90 per cent, leaving these areas vulnerable to infectious diseases and heightening the risk to the country.
In some areas, one in five one-year-olds has not been fully vaccinated. Queensland is by far the worst affected state with the rate of fully vaccinated 12-month-olds falling below 90 per cent in 23 regions, up from seven in 2020.
There are now 11 communities in Western Australia where more than 10 per cent of one-year-olds aren’t fully vaccinated, and eight in NSW, according to numbers crunched by the Grattan Institute.
Urgent work is under way to understand why fewer parents are vaccinating small children as measles outbreaks spike in Asia and the US, and whooping cough cases continue in Australia after a record-breaking 2024 during which there were 54,000 infections and a Queensland baby died.
Records reveal routine childhood immunisation rates have fallen slightly across every age group and every vaccine since the peak in 2020 when the country was close to the 95 per cent herd immunity target required to disrupt disease transmission, particularly for the highly infectious measles virus.
The slide extends to adolescent immunisation along with influenza and shingles vaccinations for adults. The National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance said vaccination coverage was suboptimal for all adult vaccines across all age groups.
Five years since Covid was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the costs are still being tallied across education, the economy and mental health, but its impact on immunisation has been a slow and consistent burn linked with ongoing disruption to health care and vaccine fatigue.
Health authorities say an erosion in trust in governments and public-health measures during the pandemic, and a rise in anti-_vaccination sentiment, also caused parents to delay or refuse to vaccinate their children.
The Covid Response Inquiry handed down late last year highlighted the need for a national strategy to improve vaccination rates and rebuild community trust in vaccines. Health Minister Mark Butler warned of 7 to 8 per cent falls in under-fives being vaccinated against measles and whooping cough. “That means we are now well below herd immunity levels for those two really important diseases,’’ Mr Butler said. “This isn’t just about the pandemic response. This is bleeding into a whole bunch of really important health programs.”
Grattan Institute health program director Peter Breadon said the overall drop in childhood immunisation was a worry but a detailed look at where the biggest dips were occurring revealed new pockets of at-risk areas.
He said that, in 2020, only 11 regions had more than 10 per cent of one-year-old children who were not fully vaccinated. As at September 2024, that had ballooned to 53 regions.
“At the national level you see a loss of a few percentage points, and you think maybe that’s not so dramatic, but we’re seeing steeper falls in areas that already had low levels of vaccination,” Mr Breadon said. “Some of those areas are getting down to 90 per cent and lower and that’s where you start to see the risks of outbreaks increasing.”
While the Gold Coast and Noosa hinterlands and the Richmond Valley near Byron Bay in NSW have persistently had some of the country’s lowest vaccination rates, big declines have occurred in other regions with traditionally stronger vaccination levels.
Mr Breadon’s analysis show that areas with vaccination rates close to or exceeding 95 per cent in 2020 – such as Barkly, north of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory; Gascoyne in WA; Clarence Valley in NSW; and Macedon Ranges in Victoria – had slumped into the 80s by September last year.
“We definitely don’t want to see low-vaccination areas getting worse and other areas following,’’ Mr Breadon said. “What really jumps out of this data is that vaccination is going down in a lot of places, but it’s really plummeting in some areas. We need a policy reset on vaccination and to use the data to focus effort and put more resources into communities that seem to have much higher barriers to vaccination.’’
Associate professor Frank Beard, from the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, said work was underway to gain a deeper understanding of the reasons for partial and under-vaccination.
“Such insights will help inform strategies aimed at reversing these downward trends and protecting more Australians from the serious and sometimes life threatening infections that can result from vaccine preventable diseases,’’ said Mr Beard, the centre’s associate director for surveillance, coverage, evaluation and social sciences.
He said that while vaccination coverage in Australia was still relatively high by global standards, the downward trend was concerning.
The federal Health Department is working on a new five-year National Immunisation Strategy to improve coverage, prepare for new diseases, strengthen community engagement and build trust in vaccines.
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