A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.

Several major polls have shown a decline in trust in childhood vaccines since the pandemic among the broader public, largely among self-identified Republicans. The Post and KFF, a health policy research and news organization, surveyed 2,716 parents this summer, providing a detailed breakdown of why some people are avoiding childhood vaccines. It also shows that the vast majority of American parents still support immunizations.

"We still have strong support for vaccines among parents in this country," said Liz Hamel, KFF vice president and director of public opinion and survey research. "What we don't know yet is whether those slight cracks we're starting to see in confidence among younger parents are going to translate into actual decisions around vaccines."

Compared with routine vaccines required to attend schools, parents are less likely to have their children receive coronavirus or flu vaccines, which reduce the risk of hospitalization and death but offer limited protection against infection and transmission.

About half of parents (52 percent) did not vaccinate their children for flu in the past year compared with 41 percent who did so, the poll finds. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates show a majority of children received flu shots every year since 2010 and the coverage started declining after 2019. Roughly 13 percent of eligible children received last year's coronavirus vaccine, according to federal estimates.

The urgency around vaccination is greater for vaccines that are very effective in preventing infections from highly infectious pathogens such as measles. More than 95 percent of a community needs to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity to prevent measles outbreaks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 92.5 percent of kindergartners received their MMR vaccines last school year. But those rates are lower in parts of the country, including in West Texas, which experienced the nation's worst measles outbreak in more than 30 years. The number of parents claiming religious or other exemptions to school mandates has been slowly rising.

Many public health experts say vaccination rates could decline further with the appointment of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime antivaccine activist, as the nation's top health official. In office, Kennedy has taken steps to revisit and revise immunization practices and raised concerns about the safety of vaccines that medical associations and the CDC have long said were baseless.

Pediatricians, the CDC, and medical experts say that recommended vaccines are proven to be safe and effective through extensive research and monitoring. "Delaying or spreading out vaccine doses leaves your child unprotected during the time when they need vaccine protection the most," the CDC writes on its website.

While past polling and research has shown the vast majority of Americans choose to vaccinate, The Post-KFF poll offers a closer look at the demographics of those who do and don't.

Democrats and Asian parents are some of the least likely to skip or delay any vaccine for their children besides coronavirus or flu, with 8 percent and 5 percent doing so, respectively.

Parents who homeschool a child (46 percent) and white parents who identify as very religious (36 percent) are most likely to skip or delay vaccines. More than 1 in 5 of both groups of parents skipped or delayed the MMR or polio vaccines.

Anna Hulkow, 39, moved her five children to Arizona in part for its looser school vaccine requirements because she could no longer send her kids to public school in California since they were not vaccinated against chickenpox, polio, or pertussis. Hulkow, who teaches at a private Christian school, said she doesn't consider herself antivaccine, as her children have received some immunizations.

But she said she distrusts the health care system as profit-motivated and believes severe reactions to vaccines have gone unreported. After switching pediatricians a few times, she now takes her children to a physician who has her own children on a delayed vaccine schedule.

She said she wonders whether her kids are better off just getting a disease like chickenpox.

"I don't think my kids are worse off to get it firsthand than they are to get it through the vaccinations," Hulkow said.

Most pediatricians and public health officials say the childhood immunization schedule has been designed to save lives and protect the vulnerable. They caution against assuming that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, which does not carry the complications and risks of the disease itself. Before vaccination, chickenpox killed 100 to 150 people a year and left thousands hospitalized, according to the CDC. Many immunizations are recommended in the first two years of life when a child is most at risk of severe disease and could infect others, such as at day care.

The Post-KFF poll finds side effects and concerns about safety are the primary reasons parents choose to skip or delay vaccination, along with doubts about whether all recommended vaccines are necessary. Those health concerns far outweigh challenges to access the health care system by factors of more than 4 to 1. Costs and securing appointments rank as the least common reasons.

Ally Barlow, who has a PhD in civil engineering, said she believes vaccines are a modern-day medical miracle and Kennedy's views on them are not research-based. But the 31-year-old Arizona mother of two said she thinks the childhood immunization schedule, a timeline for which vaccines kids should receive and when, favors the convenience of multiple shots in a visit over allowing parents to minimize risk.

She delayed some shots for her 4-year-old daughter, including for chickenpox. She said she has only vaccinated her 2-year-old son for measles and tetanus so far because he has had a host of health and growth issues.

1 in 6 US parents say they skipped or delayed their kids' vaccines, poll finds - The Boston Globe