A nurse holds a vial of COVID-19 vaccine and syringe. (Getty Images)

Wisconsin clinics and hospitals are stepping up the rollout of the newest version of the COVID-19 vaccination.

UW Health started offering the new edition vaccine to patients Wednesday and will start scheduling COVID-19 shots beginning Monday.

The Madison-based hospital and clinic system previously began giving the vaccine to people older than 65, considered the highest-risk population for the respiratory infection, according to Dr. Jim Conway, an infectious disease specialist and medical director for the UW Health immunization program.

The 2025-26 version of the vaccine is “built around the most current, circulating strains of COVID that are out there,” Conway said in an interview Wednesday. “As we all learned during the entire pandemic, these strains are mutating constantly, and so they’re constantly changing . . . You try to keep up with what’s the most prevalent.”

Major pharmacy chains typically get the first available allotments of the vaccine and have already, Conway said. In the meantime, UW Health and other health systems have been preparing to offer the shot and preparing their scheduling systems.

The vaccine’s components are developed following discussions among health experts for the World Health Organization and other agencies, Conway said. Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) take part in those discussions.

In the weeks leading up to Sept. 19, when the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP) opened its most recent meeting, public health professionals were apprehensive that the body might limit access to the COVID-19 vaccine.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has a long history of embracing unfounded claims critical of vaccines. Kennedy replaced the members of the ACIP with people viewed as skeptics of vaccination. Susan Monarez, appointed CDC director earlier this year by President Donald Trump, testified at a congressional hearing in September that Kennedy fired her for refusing to agree to his demand that she endorse ACIP’s recommendations without reviewing them.

Ahead of ACIP’s meeting, “we were all really nervous,” Conway said. Medical professional groups emphasized their endorsement of the COVID-19 shot to counter messaging from Kennedy and other HHS officials that appeared to cast doubt on the vaccine.

“Our professional societies make recommendations every year, but this year we really leaned into making sure people were aware of those and really were promoting those as … evidence-based, data driven,” he said.

When ACIP met just two days after Monarez’s testimony, the panel left in place the CDC’s recommendation for COVID-19 vaccinations from the age of six months to 64. While the panel’s recommendation highlighted concerns about risk, ACIP rejected a proposal to require a prescription for the shot.

“It’s actually in some ways reassuring that even people that may come across as skeptics and doubters at some level as they were repopulating the ACIP — even they couldn’t be swayed from how clear the evidence and the data is that these vaccines are really valuable and really safe,” Conway said. “It was a very pleasant surprise.”

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers issued an executive order to ensure COVID-19 vaccine access and the state Department of Health Services followed up with a health order that functions as a statewide prescription for the shot. The Office of the Commissioner of Insurance also issued guidance that insurance companies in Wisconsin are expected to cover the vaccine without requiring a patient co-pay.

Conway said with those actions insurers began announcing in the last week their coverage plans, which set the stage for providers to set up their vaccine programs.

The first objective of a vaccine is “to prevent you from getting serious disease,” Conway said, so patients don’t have to go to a doctor, “or aren’t getting admitted to the hospital or aren’t getting in the ICU [intensive care unit] or aren’t going on a ventilator or, God forbid, aren’t dying. That’s the ultimate goal, and that’s what the vaccines are really very good at.”

If the shot prevents a person from getting sick from the virus at all, that’s a bonus,  “but we know that that’s never completely possible with these kinds of respiratory viruses,” he added. “But we know that even if you get ill, you’re much more likely to have a very, very mild case.”

Vaccination also helps prevent the spread of disease as it reduces the amount of virus infected people are shedding, Conway said. That can reduce the chances that others will be exposed to the virus, helping to protect people whose immune systems are suppressed due to age or an underlying medical condition.

With enough people vaccinated, that allows  community immunity — “what used to be called herd immunity” — to develop, Conway said. That reduces the risk of outbreaks, “but it also starts to protect the really vulnerable parts of your population.”

The vaccine’s availability came as good news Wednesday to Patricia Fisher, a graduate student and the mother of a six-month-old. Fisher was disappointed this week when the vaccine wasn’t available at her baby’s check-up.

“It’s not just about my baby,” said Fisher,  who is enrolled in a sociology Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin. “The community is safer if more people are vaccinated.”

Fisher has a master’s degree in public health. While her own research focuses on food systems, climate change and health, she said she’s learned enough about population health outcomes to make her alarmed at the prevalence of anti-vaccine attitudes.

“I find it really, really frightening how anti-vaccine some people are, and that people are particularly worried about [vaccines for] COVID, flu and RSV [respiratory syncytial virus],” Fisher said. “COVID is a very clear and present threat to infant health and so it’s very worrying to me.”

Between the national upsurge in measles that has surfaced in Wisconsin, surges in pertussis (whooping cough) in the last couple of years, influenza and COVID-19, “there’s a lot of threats out there,” she said. “I just didn’t think that infectious disease would be the thing about parenting that would be the most stressful, but it definitely is.”

On Wednesday she made an appointment for her child’s COVID-19 shot in mid-October. “I’m thrilled it’s going to be available,” she said.

Conway said the flood of both information and misinformation about the vaccine can overwhelm people. “Sometimes the natural human response is to just hunker down and do nothing,” he said.

He counsels patience and keeping messaging simple: pointing to the decades of data on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines along with the number of professional medical organizations that have made recommendations on the basis of scientific evidence.

“I think people should understand that there’s an opportunity here to protect themselves and their families from these really potentially very unpredictable diseases that can devastate individuals, families and communities,” Conway said.

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Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services is continuing to recommend that anyone over 6 months old get an updated, annual version of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Meanwhile, the state’s DHS has put out a standing order for the vaccine. State officials say that will ensure that most Wisconsinites are able to get the COVID vaccine at pharmacies across Wisconsin without a prescription. 

This year’s Wisconsin DHS guidelines mirror guidance from a broad range of medical experts. And the guidance echoes what state and federal health officials have recommended in recent years.

Wisconsin’s recommendations stand in contrast, however, to recent moves at the federal level.

This year, the federal Food and Drug Administration has approved the new COVID vaccine for Americans ages 65 and older and for people with certain higher risk conditions. At the national level, a panel is set to meet later this week to discuss vaccine recommendations that will be provided to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a vaccine skeptic who has promoted false information about vaccines.

Wisconsin is now one of several states where health officials have moved to take statewide action on vaccines because of worries about how federal actions could impede vaccine access.

“In the past several months, leaders at federal agencies have made policy decisions and issued recommendations that aren’t supported by or directly contradict scientific consensus,” Dr. Ryan Westergaard, a chief medical officer within DHS, said during a news conference.

The latest announcement from Wisconsin’s health department comes a day after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers issued an executive order directing the Wisconsin DHS to put out its own COVID vaccine recommendations.

The order also attempts to ensure that Wisconsinites won’t have to pay out of pocket for COVID vaccines. It says that the state Office of the Commissioner of Insurance shall “direct all health insurers within their regulatory authority to provide coverage for the COVID-19 vaccine without cost-sharing to all their insureds.”

“Vaccines save lives, folks,” Evers said in a statement accompanying his order. “RFK and the Trump Administration are inserting partisan politics into healthcare and the science-based decisions of medical professionals and are putting the health and lives of kids, families, and folks across our state at risk in the process.”

State health officials are recommending that Wisconsinites get their new COVID vaccines to coincide with the fall spike in respiratory diseases. Those shots are recommended even for people who have gotten COVID shots in the past. That’s because the vaccines released in 2025 are designed to hedge against potentially waning immunity and to target newly emerging versions of the virus, Westergaard said.

“The same way that we recommend getting your flu shot booster every year, because the flu that’s going around this year might be slightly different than the flu that was going around last year, we recommend a COVID booster,” he said.

This story was originally published by WPR.

Wisconsin health department continues to urge new COVID-19 vaccine for anyone over 6 months old is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Before the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Americans faced measles infections each year. The advent of vaccination eliminated the disease in the United States by 2000. But outbreaks have returned to some U.S. communities as trust in vaccines wanes in many communities.

More than 1,300 measles cases have been confirmed this year across 41 states, the latest being Wisconsin. That’s after the state Department of Health Services on Saturday announced it confirmed nine measles infections in Oconto County — the first in Wisconsin this year. 

Each Oconto County infection involved exposure to a “common source during out-of-state travel,” the state health department said in a statement. 

“DHS, in coordination with the Oconto County Public Health, is working to identify and notify people who may have been exposed to the measles virus,” the statement said. “At this time no public points of exposure have been identified and the risk to the community remains low.”  

What should Wisconsin families know about measles? 

Wisconsin Watch spoke with two University of Wisconsin-Madison experts: Dr. Jim Conway, a professor in the Divisions of Infectious Diseases and Global Pediatrics; and Malia Jones, an assistant professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Health.

We gathered additional information from officials at multiple rural public health departments across Wisconsin and reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Below are some takeaways. 

When and where am I most susceptible to measles?

That depends on individual health and vaccination status. Very young people (especially infants too young to be vaccinated), older adults and people with compromised immune systems face higher risks for contracting measles and developing severe complications.

Measles tends to spread more easily in crowded urban environments and during travel. However, it can spread anywhere, as evidenced by recent rural outbreaks, including those in Texas, where hundreds of infections have been confirmed and two school children have died. All it really takes is exposure to an infected person. Measles is one of the most highly contagious known diseases. It can remain infectious in the air or on surfaces even after an infected person leaves the area.

To put it in perspective, measles is often reported to have an R nought value — the number used to describe contagiousness — between 12 and 18. That means if one person with measles walked into a room of vulnerable people, odds are they would infect 12 to 18 others in the room. 

What should I do if I start having measles symptoms?

Measles often starts with general cold-like symptoms such as fever, cough, runny nose and watery eyes, making it hard to immediately recognize. The rash typically appears a few days after infection — and after a contagious person may have exposed others. 

If you think you might have measles or have been exposed to it, contact your local health department or healthcare provider immediately — especially if you’re unvaccinated or traveled to an area where cases were reported.  Suspected cases can be reported to local health departments even before confirmation, allowing officials to respond more quickly. Experts recommend staying home while waiting for test results to avoid spreading the virus.

What are the risks of measles?

While some think of measles as a mild childhood illness that everyone used to get, it can be dangerous. The disease can lead to a range of complications, from ear infections and diarrhea to more severe pneumonia or brain-swelling encephalitis. Such brain inflammation can affect multiple parts of the body and even cause permanent damage, especially to the brain and hearing. 

Meanwhile, a  rare but fatal long-term brain disease called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis can develop years after the initial infection. 

Some people infected by measles may experience neurological issues or nerve damage later in life.

One lesser-known risk factor: Measles can disrupt the part of the immune system that remembers previous infections, a phenomenon known as immunity amnesia. That leaves people more vulnerable to future viruses for two to three years after a measles infection.

In higher-income countries measles kills 1 to 3 of every 1,000 people infected, 10% to 20% of infections requiring hospitalization — often due to pneumonia, dehydration or severe diarrhea. Encephalitis occurs in about 1 in 1,000 cases, and pneumonia occurs in about 5% of infections. Children who are malnourished or have limited access to medical care face significantly greater risks. 

U.S. health officials have confirmed three measles-related deaths this year. 

What if I’m unsure whether I’ve had measles or the vaccine?

If you were born before 1957, you’re generally considered immune to measles because the virus was so widespread during the pre-vaccine era. Many adults born in the 1960s and 1970s may assume they’re protected when, in fact, they were never fully vaccinated, or even vaccinated at all. A second dose of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine wasn’t added to routine childhood immunization schedules until 1989, so many adults missed one or both recommended doses. 

The bottom-line is if there’s any uncertainty around your vaccination status, it’s safe to get vaccinated again. There’s no harm in receiving an additional dose of the MMR vaccine. In fact, an extra dose is both safe and more practical — quicker and more cost-effective than getting a blood test to check your immunity.

“More is better,” Conway said. “This is not one of the vaccines that has particularly tough side effects.”

Staying up to date not only protects you from serious illness but also helps safeguard others in your community who may be more vulnerable to complications from measles.

What can I do to protect myself and others?

Vaccination is your best defense. The MMR vaccine is the most effective way to protect yourself and those around you from measles. Make sure you’ve received both recommended doses, and stay informed about outbreaks in your community, especially if you’re traveling or belong to a vulnerable group.

Visit these resources for more information

• About measles (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• How to protect your children during a measles outbreak (American Academy of Pediatrics)
• Measles cases are rising—here’s how to protect your family (Public Good News)
• How are routine vaccines tested for safety? (Public Good News)
• No, vitamin A does not prevent measles (Public Good News)

Measles has made it to Wisconsin. Here’s what to know about the virus. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.