Flu vaccination coverage among Oregon's health care workers slid to 52% during the 2025-26 season, according to new state data, continuing a six-year slide that has now cut coverage nearly in half since the pandemic's early days. The drop leaves the state far short of a long-standing federal benchmark and raises fresh concerns about protection for some of the most vulnerable patients in hospitals, dialysis centers and nursing homes.
The 52% figure marks a 2 percentage point decline from the prior season and a 33 percentage point drop over six years, according to KTVZ. As KATU reports, the Oregon Health Authority counts 145,473 eligible health care workers statewide, and the agency said fewer of them are getting vaccinated against influenza this year. Compared with the 2019-20 season, when 85% of eligible workers were vaccinated, the current rate reflects a decline of almost 40%, per KATU's reporting.
A Goal That Keeps Slipping Further Away
Oregon measures its progress against the Healthy People 2020 target of 90% vaccination coverage for health care workers. Reaching that benchmark this season would have required vaccinating an additional 55,433 workers, according to the state data cited by the same KTVZ report. The gap has only widened as coverage has fallen year after year rather than climbed toward the goal.
The slide is not new. The Oregon Health Authority's own bulletin, distributed through a GovDelivery notice, noted that the vaccination rate among eligible health care workers dropped 24% between the 2019-20 and 2023-24 seasons, falling from 85% to 61%. That bulletin described the trend as the fourth consecutive year of declining influenza vaccination rates among health care personnel in Oregon. The following season offered little relief: KOIN reported that about 54% of employees surveyed during the 2024-25 season were vaccinated, an 11% drop from the previous year and a 36% drop compared with 2019-20.
Nursing Facilities Fall Furthest Behind
Coverage varies sharply depending on where in the health system someone works. Ambulatory surgery centers reported the highest vaccination rate in 2025-26 at 62%, the same KTVZ report found, followed by hospitals at 57%, dialysis centers at 51%, inpatient psychiatric facilities at 33% and nursing facilities trailing at just 25%. That nursing facility figure continues a downward trajectory, having fallen from 30% in 2024-25, the report notes.
The pattern by facility type has held for years, even as the overall numbers worsen. During the 2023-24 season, ambulatory surgery centers again led with a 67% vaccination rate, followed by hospitals at 66%, dialysis centers at 45%, nursing facilities at 37% and inpatient psychiatric facilities at the bottom with 24%, according to the OHA bulletin. A season later, KOIN reported ambulatory surgery centers at 61% and hospitals close behind at 60%, with dialysis centers around 50% and nursing facilities and inpatient psychiatric facilities tied for last at 30%.
Oregon's low marks stand out against national figures, though the comparison comes with caveats about differing survey methods. Nationally, influenza vaccination coverage among health care personnel was 80.7% at acute care hospitals and 45.4% at nursing homes during the 2023-24 respiratory virus season, according to the CDC. A more recent CDC report pegged overall U.S. health care personnel coverage at 76.3% for the 2024-25 season, with the highest rates among pharmacists and physicians.
More Workers Are Reported With Unknown Vaccination Status
Alongside falling vaccination rates, state data shows a growing share of workers whose vaccination status was reported as “unknown.” The share of eligible Oregon health care workers in that category climbed to 29% in 2025-26, up from just 7% in 2019-20, the KTVZ report states. Meanwhile, the share who actively declined vaccination also ticked up, rising to 19% in 2025-26 from 18% the previous year.
Health care facilities report aggregate vaccination counts to the Oregon Health Authority annually. The dossier's underlying sourcing shows some disagreement over exactly how many facility types fall under that reporting requirement: the OHA's own bulletin describes four categories — ambulatory surgery centers, dialysis centers, hospitals and nursing facilities — while the KTVZ report describes five, also including inpatient psychiatric facilities.
State Health Officials Push Vaccination Tools
In response to the sustained decline, state health officials have published a toolkit and recommended measures such as hosting mass vaccination fairs, offering free vaccines to staff, launching incentive programs and using formal declination forms for workers who opt out, according to the KTVZ report. The Oregon Health Authority has emphasized that vaccination is especially important for health care workers who treat high-risk or immunocompromised patients, since influenza remains a potentially deadly virus for those populations.
Whether those tools will be enough to reverse six straight years of decline remains to be seen. For now, the data leaves Oregon's health care workforce further from the 90% target than it has been at any point since the state began tracking the slide after the 2019-20 season.
