Flu vaccine deadline for N.J. preschoolers is a month earlier than usual this year
The deadline for New Jersey kids six months and older to get their flu shot is now Nov. 30.
New Jersey parents have less than two months to get their kids vaccinated against the flu if they want to keep them enrolled in a preschool or childcare center this year — a deadline that has moved up from past years.
The New Jersey Department of Health now requires that children 6 months and older who attend a childcare center or preschool receive an annual flu shot by Nov. 30 each year. Children under six months old cannot get the flu vaccine. Students in kindergarten through 12th grade are not required to get a flu shot.
The deadline, previously Dec. 31, was adjusted in January alongside a number of other changes to the state’s immunization laws “to ensure that children are protected when flu season begins in late fall and to help with timely collection of immunization data from the facilities for follow-up,” according to New Jersey Department of Health spokesperson Dalya Ewais.
Children who do not get their flu vaccine by the deadline will be excluded from school until they either get the shot or the official flu season ends on March 31. The health department’s existing rules for medical and religious vaccine exemptions are still in place.
The earlier deadline should help better protect kids against the virus by getting them immunized before flu season is in full swing on the East Coast, according to Jeff Fendrick, a Gibbsboro pediatrician who works within the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia network.
“It does look like we’re going to be seeing the flu at an earlier time and so in moving up the date, that’ll make the protection for all these kids earlier, and that’s a good thing,” Fendrick said.
“We don’t want anyone to get the flu, but we definitely don’t want them to get seriously ill,” he said. “And that’s where protecting the kids with the vaccine — especially younger than 5 — is so important.”
The exact timeline for flu season is hard to predict, said Lori Handy, associate director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Multiple circulating strains often peak at different times, she said, but the season generally runs from early fall to late spring.
“If you think about a child in daycare, maybe a family forgets and they get back to daycare Jan. 2 after the holidays and realize they’re not vaccinated. Now you’re chasing vaccine opportunities far into flu season,” Handy said.
“So by moving to Nov. 30, there’s a lot more opportunity to capture the families, make sure they get vaccinated before flu season has taken off, and it actually makes the policy effective instead of really kind of rolling into the New Year,” she said.
Young children are among the most at risk of having severe complications from the virus, Handy said.
Children ages 6 months to 5 years have the second-highest rate of hospitalization from the flu, surpassed only by kids who are too young to be vaccinated, she said.
“What a flu vaccine really does is it may not prevent infection altogether, but it prevents those bad outcomes, those emergency department visits, hospitalizations, ICU admissions,” she said. “And so you’re really helping those kids who are most at risk of becoming most severely ill.”
The flu vaccine typically takes one or two weeks to become effective, she said, so the earlier that kids receive their shots, the better.
While the flu shot deadline was moved up, the state’s other childhood vaccine requirements remain unchanged and continue to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics Immunization Schedule.
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