EDMONTON — Many Alberta teens missed vital routine vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a University of Alberta study, which calls for extra measures to ensure students are protected against HPV and meningitis.
Shannon MacDonald, registered nurse, associate professor in the Faculty of Nursing and adjunct professor in the School of Public Health, and her research team found that rates of routine immunizations in grades 6 and 9 declined dramatically during the pandemic.
“School vaccinations came to a standstill during the pandemic,” she says “The public health system was operating in unprecedented circumstances and it could only be stretched so far.”
The research team reviewed immunization records from 289,420 Alberta teens scheduled to receive vaccines against meningococcal disease and human papillomavirus (HPV) before, during and immediately after pandemic school closures.
They found that while 65 percent of children received the full HPV vaccine series before COVID, just five percent were fully immunized during the first pandemic year and six per cent the following year. By the fall of 2021, the number rebounded to 50 percent. The HPV vaccine is two doses for Grade 6 students.
For the meningitis vaccine, immunization rates dropped from about 80 percent pre-COVID to 55 percent during the pandemic, before rebounding to 83 percent afterward. The vaccine against meningococcal disease is usually given in one dose in Grade 9.
MacDonald explains that even when schools reopened, public health nurses were redeployed to work in COVID-19 vaccination clinics, so the interruption of school immunizations continued.
“The fact is we want at least 90 percent of kids vaccinated,” she says. “We're talking about a vaccine to prevent HPV-related cancers — throat cancer, penile cancer, cervical cancer — and another against meningococcal disease that can take kids’ hands and feet, or even their lives.
“We need to catch up to our pre-COVID levels, but we also should be trying to exceed (those levels).”
MacDonald, who is working on a follow up study to track recovery of routine school immunizations rates, says it’s critical for the public health system to catch up before these students graduate and are much harder to track down. Some measures are underway, including extra nurses in schools to deliver missed doses, offering vaccines in high schools and encouraging families to visit public health clinics for missed immunizations. Other possible measures could include greater efforts to engage parents whose first language is not English using translated materials.
More information is available here. To speak with Shannon MacDonald please contact: Sarah Vernon | University of Alberta communications associate | svernon@ualberta.ca