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The share of U.S. kindergartners with exemptions from school vaccine requirements for the 2025-2026 school year rose to another record high, according to federal data posted Monday. The sharp increase from 3.6% to 4.2% seeking exemptions — about 155,000 students — extends a yearslong erosion of childhood immunization rates as the country battles its worst measles resurgence in 35 years.

As exemptions increased, U.S. kindergarten vaccination rates fell slightly for all reported vaccines from the year before. Coverage for the major vaccines required for kindergarten — MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella); DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis); poliovirus vaccine (polio); and varicella (chickenpox) — decreased in more than half of states for the second year in a row, the CDC said.

The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention arrive as President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seek sweeping changes to the childhood immunization schedule.

Trump last week directed federal health officials to move toward giving the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines separately rather than in the combined MMR shot and to space out childhood vaccinations over more medical visits. The combined shot has been a cornerstone of measles prevention for decades, and separate measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are not currently available in the United States.

The proposal defies guidance from major medical groups and is directly at odds with CDC’s own scientific guidance.

“No published scientific evidence shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots,” the agency says on its MMR vaccine safety page as of Monday. Elsewhere on CDC’s website, the agency says combination vaccines reduce the number of injections children receive while providing the same protection and may help more children get recommended vaccinations on time.

The new CDC data released this week shows a continuing decline in childhood vaccination rates and rise in exemption rates, and what’s at stake as the administration seeks to remake federal vaccine policy.

The biggest factor in the increasing exemption rate came from families seeking nonmedical exemptions, the data shows. Exemptions increased across a broader expanse of the country last year, rising in 41 states and the District of Columbia, compared with 36 states and the District the previous year. Twenty-four states now report exemption rates exceeding 5%.

In terms of vaccine coverage, the data shows that 92.4% of kindergartners had received the required two doses of the MMR vaccine during the 2025-2026 school year, down slightly from 92.5% the previous year. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the rate was 95%, the level at which it is generally considered unlikely that a single infection will trigger a disease cluster or outbreak. The number of kindergartners attending school without documentation of completing the MMR vaccine series was about 280,000 during the 2025-2026 school year.

Coverage for other required childhood vaccines also declined, dropping to 92% for DTaP, from 92.1% the previous year, and to 92.4% for polio, from 92.5% the previous year.

“Measles and other infectious diseases don’t stop at the classroom door,” said James Campbell, chairperson of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland. “That’s why school entry requirements matter: They protect and keep entire communities safe, and experience shows that when parents receive clear, trustworthy information from health professionals, they’re far more likely to choose vaccination.”

On Friday, CDC reported 2,566 confirmed measles cases so far this year, 101 more than the previous week’s tally and already exceeding the 2,289 cases recorded during all of 2025. Ninety-three percent of the cases were in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown.

CDC made no mention of the record increase in exemptions in a statement accompanying Monday’s data, and stopped short of directly encouraging parents to vaccinate their children. Instead, CDC said that it “continues to encourage parents to discuss vaccination options with their doctors.”

If parents are worried about what shots their children need for school, they should keep in mind that states, not the federal government, generally set vaccination requirements for school attendance, public health experts say. As of Aug. 11, 30 states had announced that they are no longer relying solely on federal guidelines for their own childhood vaccine recommendations, according to KFF, a health policy organization. Many state health departments have said they will rely on external expert groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics instead.

Decades of research involving millions of children have established the safety and effectiveness of the MMR vaccine. Two doses of the vaccine are about 97% effective in preventing measles, which can result in serious complications, including pneumonia, swelling of the brain, and, in rare cases, death from respiratory and neurological complications, according to CDC. Extensive research has found no link between MMR vaccination and autism.

The White House has said its proposed changes to the immunization schedule, which also call for reducing the number of universally recommended vaccines, are designed to align the United States with its peer nations. But peer nations like Denmark, Australia, and Canada give MMR immunizations in a combination vaccine. Britain this year began replacing the MMR shot with a four-in-one vaccine that also protects against chicken pox.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) blasted Trump’s overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule Sunday, saying it will raise costs for patients and make vaccines less accessible. Trump has defended the move as sparing children from the combination MMR vaccine, which he said was “sort of like a nuclear weapon.”

“Now instead of your child getting two shots, she has to get six shots,” Cassidy said Sunday on ABC’s This Week. “Instead of … you missing work to take your child to the doctor two times, you’re doing it six times. And instead of the insurance company paying for two visits, it’s now paying for six visits.”

The collision between the White House’s vaccine agenda and the scientific guidance of the agency charged with carrying it out also presents an immediate test for Erica Schwartz, who began work as CDC director last week.

During Schwartz’s confirmation process, senators repeatedly pressed her on whether she would defend scientific evidence if Kennedy or other administration officials sought changes unsupported by it. Cassidy ultimately supported her nomination after initially expressing concerns, saying after additional conversations that he was confident Schwartz “knows what she is doing and will stand against those who do not.”

Even though CDC is responsible for federal vaccine policy following recommendations from its independent vaccine advisory committee, scientists at the agency said they did not know that the executive order was coming, and officials are unsure of what it means for the agency.

The White House is calling for Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines to craft proposed changes within 90 days. The long-defunct panel was revived last year after a push from anti-vaccine activists. That task force makes recommendations that aim to improve vaccine safety, not to determine the optimal vaccine schedule, public health law experts have said.

Sixty days ago, seated beside French President Emmanuel Macron at a lavish dinner at the Palace of Versailles, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran and declared the beginning of the end of the U.S. conflict with Tehran.

The “historic breakthrough” would lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and ensure Iran never obtained a nuclear weapon, the White House declared. Trump advisers said the deal would demonstrate that the president could end, rather than prolong, the kind of “endless wars” in the Middle East he had spent years denouncing.

The agreement set aside two months for talks to turn the interim truce into something more ambitious: a broader settlement of the decades-long standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

That window has now closed.

The war has not ended. The Strait of Hormuz remains largely shut. Detailed negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program never began.

The United States has resumed its blockade of Iranian ports. Tehran is demanding concessions that the Trump administration has rejected. And the administration has now publicly disowned several of the key points in the ill-fated memorandum, including development of a plan “with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and development” of Iran, a waiver of sanctions to allow Iran to sell oil, and a “dialogue” between Iran and Oman over how to run the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump on Monday went so far as to threaten to bomb Oman over its talks with Iran on management of the strait, through which 20% of the world’s oil used to pass.

If Oman “gets in the way,” Trump said in a Fox News interview, the U.S. would “bomb the s— out of them.” He demanded that Iran raise “the white flag of surrender” while insisting that neither the approaching midterm elections nor the passage of time was putting pressure on him to reach a deal.

“I have no time schedule,” Trump said. “I’m not in a hurry. … Midterms have nothing to do with my thinking.”

Six months after he launched attacks on Iran in coordination with Israel and 78 days before elections that will determine whether his party retains control of Congress, Trump confronts the kind of open-ended conflict he claimed he was uniquely equipped to avoid: one with no obvious military resolution, no diplomatic breakthrough in sight, and mounting economic and political costs at home.

Continuing the standoff risks leaving him presiding over a war that undercuts one of the central premises of his political identity.

The war has helped to erode voters’ trust in Trump and may have larger consequences in the midterms, said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist University Institute for Public Opinion.

“For a lot of voters, the war in Iran is linked with the economy. When the strait closed, the price of gas went up,” Miringoff said. “The problem for President Trump and the Republicans is that a lot of what he was elected on seems to not be being fulfilled. So there’s a sense of no rationale for why we went in, and no clear sense of how it’s going, and no indication of how we’re going to get out, which is the opposite of what makes for good politics.”

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the memorandum’s expiration or the impact it will have on the president’s political goals.

Trump’s overall standing has deteriorated as the war has dragged on. Strikingly, surveys show an erosion of support among Republicans, whose intense loyalty has been the foundation of Trump’s political power.

An Economist-YouGov poll released last week found Trump’s approval among Republicans at 79%, a second-term low and 15 points below its level shortly after he returned to office. The share of Republicans who strongly approve of his performance has fallen even more sharply, from 68% to 48%.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll last month found a new low of 15% of Americans “approve strongly” of Trump’s job performance. The finding marked the first time the Post-Ipsos poll found that significantly more than half of Trump approvers support him only “somewhat,” rather than strongly.

The declines cannot be attributed to the Iran war alone. Voters have also expressed frustration about inflation, gasoline prices, and other aspects of Trump’s presidency. But those issues have increasingly become intertwined: The war and the continued disruption of oil shipments have helped make Trump’s foreign-policy predicament an economic and political problem at home.

Trump has continued to insist that an end to the stalemate is in the offing. On Monday, he told Fox News that the U.S. was engaged in back-channel talks with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

An IRGC spokesperson quickly denied the claim. Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi told Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim News Agency that there were no talks between Revolutionary Guard officials and the Americans, dismissing Trump’s assertion as a product of “defeat and desperation in the war.”

Alan Eyre, a former diplomat who served on the U.S. negotiating team that secured the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, said the war has transitioned from a military operation into an economic pressure campaign that the U.S. hopes can force Iran to capitulate. But any economic pain will be felt primarily by the Iranian people, he said, rather than forcing change from the increasingly hard-line regime.

“The U.S. has no good options,” said Eyre, who is a distinguished diplomatic fellow at the Middle East Institute. “This war has broken a complex system. And it is not getting back to the way it was before Feb. 28.”

The White House is working to strengthen safeguards against biological attacks after staffing cuts early in the second Trump administration depleted expertise in a field where officials increasingly fear artificial intelligence could make it easier to create deadly pathogens.

By the end of President Joe Biden’s term, the White House had built a team of as many as 30 people focused on biological security, according to three former government officials who worked on the issue — two for Biden and Trump, and one just for Biden — and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional retaliation.

This specialized staff was charged with coordinating the web of federal agencies that deal with biohazards and provided scientific guidance to top officials.

That team rapidly dwindled after Trump returned to office amid cuts and reorganizations, said the three former officials, as well as a fourth former official, who also worked for both administrations. At times, nobody at the White House was dedicated solely to biosecurity, according to three of the former officials.

The losses have come as the administration has delayed replacing key Biden-era directives. It revoked a 2023 executive order on AI calling for stronger biological safeguards and cast doubt on a policy issued the following year designed to require companies to screen buyers seeking genetic components that could be used to create biological agents — widely seen by experts as a basic pillar of the nation’s defenses.

Trump directed officials to produce a revised version by August 2025. More than a year later, it has yet to appear, even as AI companies say their most advanced models are gaining increasingly sophisticated biological capabilities alongside the hacking skills that have alarmed officials this year.

“They have kneecapped themselves in their ability to create any policy that would have staying power,” said one of the former experts, who recently worked directly on outbreak response policy. “That’s the risk, they’re not playing the long game. The whole purpose of having the technocrats there is to advise political leaders on the nuanced tradeoffs of taking one path or another.”

In the absence of a large team, the White House has relied on a small revolving cast of employees. They have included a junior fellow without a security clearance; a part-timer from the research organization Rand; a pair of CIA staffers with little expertise in the field; and an Air Force doctor who had been a consultant to the White House medical office, according to the three experts.

A White House official said the administration was working to strengthen the Biden-era policy, calling it inadequate and technically limited despite the staff devoted to developing it, and did not address questions about the staffing changes.

“The Administration’s commitment to addressing AI and biological safety risks is clear and ongoing,” the official said in an email. “The White House has been developing policy for over a year, including in our AI Action Plan last summer.”

The Trump administration has acknowledged the biological security risks AI poses while touting the potential for the technology to help keep the nation safe. Trump told foreign leaders gathered at the United Nations last year that he wanted to prevent biological weapons disasters and said AI was a tool to help.

At the Pentagon, a former health official who led Operation Warp Speed — the effort during the first Trump administration to rapidly produce a vaccine for the coronavirus — is involved in efforts to use AI to speed the development of new defenses against future pandemics and to deter biowarfare. Part of the work involves analyzing billions of tweaks to antibodies to assess how to respond to new forms of the coronavirus.

But that work is taking place in a government that analysts and the former experts say has been drained of expertise amid broader cuts to federal public health and science funding.

The White House removed all the staff from the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, an organization created to lead the nation’s response to the kind of major outbreak that the most dangerous kind of bioweapon could trigger. The office was resurrected as Ebola spread in Africa this spring.

A National Security Council unit dedicated to health security was also shut, two of the former experts said, and parts of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security responsible for biological threats were broken up as part of broader reorganizations.

A scientist who worked on biotechnology and national security issues in both the first Trump and Biden administrations said the federal government is not taking a leading role in coordinating a response to the risks posed by the rapidly evolving technology.

“Every time an administration changes over there’s a lot of continuity that just gets disrupted,” said the scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by their employer to speak publicly. In the transition from Biden to Trump, they said, “when it comes to biosecurity, that happened in a very disruptive way.”

There has never been one federal agency responsible for biosecurity, a sprawling field that encompasses efforts to secure research labs, aspects of public health work, and international diplomacy, and which is increasingly focused on the role of AI. But an analysis of Trump’s most recent budget request by the Council on Strategic Risks, a Washington-based security-policy think tank, concluded that the administration’s rhetoric on biosecurity was not matched by its funding proposals. In a separate analysis, the group found that spending across multiple government departments peaked in 2024, before declining slightly in Trump’s first year — with the administration proposing further cuts.

“General programmatic cuts and agency-specific reorganizations have restricted and eliminated key programs, clouding budgetary transparency and weakening US deterrence efforts,” the council wrote in a blog post.

When Trump returned to office last year, his team was focused on eliminating barriers to the development of AI technology. That approach began to shift this spring when a new generation of models proved to be capable of hacking into computer networks, leading administration officials to embrace the kind of government oversight of yet-to-be released tools that they had once spurned.

There are now signs that officials are taking additional interest in the potential dangers. That has included a recent string of briefings on biological risks between OpenAI, the White House, and half a dozen government agencies, according to a person familiar with the meetings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe their private nature. Politico reported this month that the White House was launching a new initiative involving its cybersecurity office and a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Leaders in the AI industry have long said that their tools being used to enable a biological attack ranks among their top fears.

“I’m getting very frustrated,” said David Relman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who worked on pandemic response in the Biden White House.

The newest AI models, such as Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6, have continued to get better at high-level biological research. But just as the models’ ability to write computer code has made them good at hacking, their biological capabilities have stoked fears that they could be used to help build a new bioweapon, set off a new pandemic, or aid even a relative amateur in carrying out a biological attack. This month, the journal Science published the results of a successful effort to use AI to engineer new viruses. They were designed to infect bacteria rather than humans, but the outcome was a clear sign of what is becoming possible.

As early as last summer, researchers at OpenAI determined that they were close to reaching “high” levels of capability in biology, which the company defines as capabilities that “significantly increase existing risk vectors for severe harm.” The company briefed the Trump administration and hosted more than 50 government experts for a summit at its San Francisco headquarters last July to discuss how its systems could be used for biological defense. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

The company said it has continued to work with the administration, aiming to provide officials with access to a special version of GPT for biological defense that it calls Rosalind.

“The Administration has increasingly prioritized this important issue as AI capabilities have expanded, and we welcome their partnership,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in an email.

Despite the growing concern, scientists remain divided on how serious the risks are, how soon they might materialize, and how the nation should prepare. Large language models that power chatbots could be helping terrorists to do tricky lab work, and specialized biological design tools could aid in the creation of new kinds of deadly pathogens not readily recognized by current methods of surveillance.

In October, researchers at Microsoft detailed how they had patched gaps in detection systems after using AI to engineer digital versions of thousands of toxins that were not caught by the existing safety net.

A report by Rand concluded that attackers have a significant advantage over defenders when it comes to biological incidents. Someone carrying out an attack could make multiple efforts, while authorities need to be able to tackle every threat because even one “could result in catastrophic consequences.”

Leading American AI firms have sought to lock down their models, blocking them from answering questions about risky biological research and providing more capable systems only to trusted partners. But AI guardrails are imperfect and OpenAI said in July that its testing of leading Chinese models, which are made freely available, indicates that they do not have the same kinds of protections built in.

“I think we have a massive collective-action problem in front of us,” said Relman, the Stanford professor.

AI systems have gone on runaway hacking sprees in recent months but, for now, experts say the barrier between the digital world and the biological one presents a major hurdle — and an important line of defense. Yet that could begin to change as companies seek to automate laboratories.

“The ultimate fears are a ways out,” said Crystal Grant, a researcher at the Council on Strategic Risks. “We have a lead time before they’re here to prepare ourselves.”

Because the same abilities can allow AI to be used for dangerous and helpful biological research, many scientists also fear their work becoming too tightly regulated.

The Trump administration recently released a new policy on what it calls dangerous gain of function research. It’s a long-standing approach involving tinkering with pathogens in order to better understand how to defend against them. But it has become increasingly controversial in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump administration has embraced the theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab that was undergoing gain of function work. Some scientists say the new policy is vague and could impede legitimate research.

In the private sector, researchers complained that biological guardrails Anthropic put on its most powerful model were too strict. The company loosened the restrictions this month.

Paul Friedrichs, a retired Air Force general, said the need to get the balance of safety and progress right underscored the need for strong leadership and expertise in the federal government.

Friedrichs, who ended his government career leading the White House pandemic office under Biden, said the cuts in the Trump administration have “unquestionably” left the nation less well prepared and at risk of squandering an incredible opportunity.

“We’re on the cusp of curing some of the banes of humanity,” Friedrichs said.