☀️Mostly sunny, then isolated showers with a high of 61. It’s day 23 of the federal government shutdown.
All this week, we’ll be looking at vaccination rates across Massachusetts as part of our Connecting the Commonwealth series, Unraveling Immunity. And we want to hear from you: what conversations have you had about vaccines in your family or community? Reply to this email or send a note to daily@wgbh.org and we might include your thoughts in a future newsletter.
Four Things to Know
- Mothers charged with crimes would have to be evaluated for postpartum psychosis and other mental health disorders if a new Massachusetts bill is passed into law. Supporters, including health care providers and advocates, say that in rare but serious cases, mental health crises can look like intentional crimes. This bill aims to shift the focus from punishment to compassion and care, ensuring that struggling mothers get the help they need. “The bill under consideration is not a free pass,” testified Dr. Lee Cohen, who leads the women’s mental health center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Its provisions essentially place appropriate evaluation and treatment into the mix.”
- Mariners across New England are delighted with the U.S. Coast Guard’s decision to abandon plans to remove navigational buoys from Northeast waterways. The proposal aimed to promote modern navigational tools, like GPS, but it received a flood of criticism from harbormasters, pilot associations and ship captains. The United States Coast Guard Northeast District said yesterday that it received more than 3,200 comments to the Coastal Buoy Modernization Proposal and, as a result, “there will be no changes to the aids to navigation system (ATON) at this time until further analysis is complete.”
- Through the first three quarters of 2025, home sales in Massachusetts are up about 3% from last year, but analysts say they expect a “slower, more thoughtful” market as fall gives way to winter. Through September, there were 31,980 single-family home sales in Massachusetts — about 1,000 more than at the same point in 2024, The Warren Group reported.
- With immigration enforcement surging in Massachusetts, a coalition of advocates rallied Wednesday, urging lawmakers to revive a long-stalled proposal that top legislative leaders have repeatedly dismissed. The rally comes a week after federal officials announced the results of “Operation Patriot 2.0,” a targeted effort — between Sept. 4 and 30 — during which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested 1,406 people statewide due to their immigration status. Supporters of the Safe Communities Act say the stepped-up raids have stoked fear in immigrant communities and underscore the need to prevent local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.
Some Mass schools fall far behind on childhood vaccines, posing challenges to districts
Vaccines are a requirement for Massachusetts public school students (unless they’ve received a medical or religious exemption.) But in some districts, a combination of skipping vaccines and incomplete record-keeping can lead to lower vaccination rates: Greenfield High School has a vaccination rate of 51%, Greenfield Middle School of 77% and Newton Elementary, also in Greenfield, of 68%, Connecting the Commonwealth reporter Karen Brown of New England Public Media found.
Those numbers may not be as concerning as they sound: in some cases it might mean a student is missing one vaccine, or got all their shots but did not submit complete records.
“But … even if you bake all of those possibilities into it, there’s still going to be a very high number that are not vaccinated or don’t have the records,” regional epidemiologist Jack Sullivan told Brown. “And that’s where it gets concerning.”
Megan Tudryn, a public health nurse for Greenfield and surrounding towns, said she’s “personally not concerned about our vaccination rates.”
“Technically, people can be excluded from school … if they’re just choosing not to get vaccinated,” Tudryn told Brown. “But we don’t want to keep kids home. I don’t know of any school that would actually enforce that.”
Down in Springfield, school department spokesperson Azell Cavaan said it can be a “constant struggle” to make sure kids are vaccinated. Sometimes students are missing vaccines because they immigrated from a place with different requirements. The city, Cavaan said, tries to reach out and set up clinics to help families through the process.
“We try to find out what the barriers are [for families],” Cavaan said. “Sometimes it’s their religious exemptions. Sometimes they’re just uneducated. So we really try to take that route as opposed to keeping students out of school.”
Back in Greenfield, Greenfield Middle School PTO member Andrea Michael said her kids are vaccinated, but she doesn’t always feel comfortable bringing up the issue with other parents.
“It’s such a charged topic that I think people don’t talk about it,” she said. “You don’t know if you’re going to run into somebody who’s so anti vaccines and then you’re going to have an uncomfortable conversation or maybe vice versa.”
You can read Karen Brown’s full story here.
Dig deeper:
-3 Northeast states banned religious exemptions for vaccines. What about Massachusetts?
