Novi kindergartners are vaccinated near the 95% herd-immunity threshold, even as Michigan's school vaccine waiver rate hit a decade high.

State data analyzed in a Bridge Michigan report, carried by The Oakland Press, published Sunday, Sept. 20, placed Novi Community School District, which serves more than 6,720 students, alongside Ann Arbor, Portage and East Grand Rapids as suburban districts where kindergarten immunization completion hovers near that benchmark. The finding stands out against a statewide picture that has grown steadily worse.

Michigan's overall school immunization waiver rate climbed to 7.1% in 2025, up from 6.2% in 2024. It is the highest exemption rate since 2010, when 8.6% of students received permission to skip at least some routine shots.

Kindergartners led the trend. Statewide, 7.7% received waivers in 2025, up from 6.8% the year before.

Nearly 25,000 students across the state held vaccine exemptions in 2025. Of those, 58% cited philosophical reasons, 39.4% cited religious reasons and 2.6% had medical exemptions, according to MLive. Public schools statewide posted a 90% total immunization rate. Private schools trailed at 80.9%, according to the state health department.

Abram Wagner, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, said schools with high waiver rates face elevated risk because large groups of children in close quarters make it easy to spread vaccine-preventable diseases. Wagner called 2020 an "inflection point" driven by political and cultural forces.

Michigan's waiver rate had dropped as low as 3.1% in 2015 after the state began requiring parents to attend a vaccine education session at their local health department before receiving an exemption. Rates stayed below 4% until 2021, the first full year after the onset of COVID-19. Wagner said studies show waiver regulations often have a short-term effect, but parents eventually learn how to work around them.

Districts with the highest kindergarten waiver rates include Lapeer Community Schools, Howell Public Schools and North Branch Area Schools, all in the double digits. Oxford Virtual Academy reported the most waivers among kindergartners statewide: 93 of its 205 kindergarten students were granted exemptions.

The CDC reports the national kindergarten exemption rate rose to 4.2% during the 2025-2026 school year, up from 3.6% the year before. Michigan reported 16 measles cases during the summer of 2026.

In August 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling to reduce the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11. Senior World Health Organization officials condemned the move. Michigan Chief Medical Executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian affirmed the state's recommendation to follow the childhood vaccine schedule established by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups.

In a Sept. 2 MLive report on the same state data, Bagdasarian tied the trend to growing confusion among families. "This is what happens when vaccines become politicized and families are left confused by contradictory guidance," she said at the time.

The Michigan for Vaccines coalition launched during the summer of 2026 to improve local immunization policy, combining the voices of public health workers, physicians and advocates.