Much of the talk around vaccines over the last year has been about COVID-19, but D.C. officials want families to make sure they’re up to date with other required vaccinations ahead of the 2022-23 school year.

On Monday Mayor Muriel Bowser and city health officials announced a renewed push to get school-aged kids caught up on immunizations that are required to attend school, saying that families will be able to get them at school-based health centers or mobile medical vans that will fan out across D.C. starting in August.

Starting this week, health and schools officials will also start reaching out to families whose children are behind on required immunizations for everything from measles and whooping cough to polio and hepatitis.

“Parents get kids [their] shots every single year, and we have to get back to that cycle of making sure that our children are vaccinated. An outbreak of measles or whooping cough in a world where we have safe and effective vaccines should be unacceptable to all of us,” said Mayor Muriel Bowser at a press conference Monday afternoon.

The initiative comes amidst broad indication across the globe that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many normal pediatric visits, leading to a decline in the number of children being immunized against diseases that have largely been kept under control. According to an Oct. 2021 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “there were weekly vaccine administration rates that were substantially lower across pediatric age groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In D.C., health officials say that only 80% of kindergartners are now immunized against measles and 79% have gotten whooping cough vaccine.

“Those percentages suggest there are not enough kids vaccinated to prevent an outbreak at our schools,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the senior deputy director for DC Health’s Community Health Administration. “To protect all our children, we want to have all our children vaccinated.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the ideal rate of immunization to create herd immunity against measles is 95%.

Under current D.C. rules, every child who attends a school must be up to date with a range of immunizations, though limited medical and religious exemptions are permitted. If they have not gotten their immunizations or an exemption within the first 20 days of school, children are not permitted to return. (D.C. did briefly have a law that allowed kids over the age of 11 to get approved immunizations without parental consent, but in March it was blocked by a federal judge.)

“The requirement will be enforced, it will be,” stressed Bowser. “So now is the time to start planning for your appointments and getting your kids vaccinated.”

Late last year the D.C. Council passed a bill imposing a requirement for students to get the COVID-19 vaccine, with enforcement kicking off at the start of the 2022-23 school year in August. That requirement only applies to kids for whom the vaccine was fully approved by the FDA; for kids aged 5-11, the vaccine is still under emergency authorization, so the city’s new requirement doesn’t apply.

Still, Bowser urged families to get their kids vaccinated against COVID-19 regardless.

“If there is a COVID exposure in their classroom and they’re unvaccinated, they can’t go to school. What we know is there is COVID… and the best defense is using the safe and effective vaccine,” she said.