© Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times/TNS
Luxiano González, 8, of El Monte, receives a childhood dose of the Pfizer vaccine from Jacqueline Valdez at Eugene A. Obregon Park on November 3, 2021 in Los Angeles.
All states require that children receive a series of shots before enrolling in school. Typically, these inoculations are for protection against polio, diphtheria, pertussis, measles, rubella, mumps, tetanus, meningitis, and chickenpox.
Despite the fact that COVID-19 has claimed about 830,000 lives in the United States, including fewer than 700 children, only two states – California and Louisiana – have added COVID-19 vaccines to the list of mandatory immunizations. for schoolchildren. Both requirements would go into effect next school year, and only if the vaccines receive full clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA has granted emergency clearance and has stated that the vaccines are safe and effective for children.
The virus is much less deadly for children than it is for adults, and federal regulators continue to review vaccines for most school-age children, although final approval is likely to be near. There are also bureaucratic complications: Children often receive the other required vaccinations before entering kindergarten and do not need additional doses, whereas at this time multiple doses of the COVID-19 vaccines are needed to achieve immunity.
But the main reason states are shunning the vaccine requirement for school children, according to public health experts, is that they do not want to open another front in the wars that have been unleashed around a wide range. of rules and restrictions on COVID-19 since the pandemic began.
Distance learning and school masking policies have sparked fierce conflict in many communities. And many Republican officials and conservative media figures have lashed out at governments and private companies for pressuring people to get vaccinations.
“Polarization largely describes why we’re not seeing vaccination requirements,” said Christine Pitts, a policy fellow at the University of Washington Center for Reinventing Public Education, which tracks COVID-19 policies across the 100 largest school districts in the country.
Pitts and other policy experts say they see no signs that opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine requirements is morphing into widespread pressure on schools to ditch the requirements for other long-standing vaccines. However, the anti-vaccine movement has gained traction during the pandemic. For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense doubled its donations in 2020, raising $ 6.8 million, while vastly expanding its reach in the past two years, according to recent research by The Associated. Press.
“We are being very careful not to be intentionally dominant and to allow school systems to take the lead in their individual jurisdictions,” Dennis Schrader, Maryland’s secretary of health, told The Baltimore Sun in September when asked about a mandate from the COVID-19 vaccine.
“We are being very deferential to them. We are giving them our guidance and our best advice, but we don’t want to be interventionist in terms of school policy.”
Waiting for final approval
Last summer, the United States Department of Justice issued a memorandum saying that public and private entities, including schools, could make COVID-19 vaccines mandatory under the emergency clearance granted by the FDA.
California and Louisiana have said they will not enforce their COVID-19 vaccination requirements until the next school year, and only if the FDA fully authorizes vaccines for children. The FDA has fully licensed Pfizer’s vaccine for those ages 16 and older, and has granted an emergency clearance for children ages 5 to 16. The agency has not authorized, even on an emergency basis, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines for those under 18 years of age.
Washington, DC, has also adopted a school COVID-19 vaccination requirement that will go into effect in March, but again, only if the vaccine is fully licensed. In New York, Legislature Democrats have also introduced measures that would institute the COVID-19 vaccine requirement following full FDA approval.
Some large districts, such as the Los Angeles Unified School District, have instituted immunization mandates that are not dependent on full FDA approval. The Los Angeles district planned to switch unvaccinated students to online education starting this month. But last month, given the existence of 30,000 unvaccinated students, he delayed the deadline until the fall.
The Oakland (California) School District enacted a similar policy with a January 1 deadline, which it recently extended to the end of this month.
Other large districts, such as New York City, the District of Columbia, and some or all of the districts of California, Hawaii, and Maryland, have required the vaccine for students who want to participate in extracurricular activities or sports.
Ten states, Washington, DC, and more than a dozen of the nation’s 100 largest school districts require that all teachers and staff be vaccinated, and hundreds of colleges and universities have mandatory COVID-19 vaccination requirements for students. students and staff.
Many parents who have not vaccinated their children say that the absence of a full FDA clearance is a factor, as it suggests that the vaccines have not been fully screened.
“There are people who are concerned that this has been approved quickly and that it has not been on the market very long, so it is different from the vaccine against measles, mumps or tetanus, vaccines that have been on the market for a long time. “said Hemi Tewarson, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy.
According to an analysis by the American Academy of Pediatrics, as of the end of December, 53 percent of children ages 12 to 17 had been fully vaccinated, and 23 percent of those ages five to 12 had received at least one dose. Pfizer’s vaccine for younger children received emergency clearance in late October; for the elderly it was approved in May.
Resistance in the red states
Although few states are adding the COVID-19 vaccine to their list of mandatory school vaccinations, some are taking steps to block any requirements. According to tracking by the National Academy for State Health Policy, 17 states, most of them Republican-dominated, have passed laws banning COVID-19 vaccine requirements for school attendance.
Oklahoma State Senator Rob Standridge sponsored the measure that became law in his state last year.
Standridge said that while it is not considered anti-vaccination, it considers vaccination mandates to be discriminatory. “What worries me is that they are targeting the unvaccinated,” said Standridge, who is a pharmacist.
He cited several reasons for opposing the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students, including reports that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were followed by higher-than-expected incidents of temporary myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, in males. between 16 and 29 years old. (The researchers noted that COVID-19 is much more likely to cause heart problems than vaccines.)
He also noted that children have generally had a milder experience with COVID-19 than adults. Consequently, he said he does not believe the government should force parents to vaccinate their children against COVID-19.
“Philosophically and as a healthcare professional, these kinds of medical decisions should be left to the parents for their children,” he said. Still, Standridge said he is not interested in repealing other vaccination requirements in schools.
New Hampshire State Representative Timothy Lang Sr., also a Republican, sponsored a new law that prevents any public facility, including prisons, government offices, universities and public schools, from requiring the COVID-19 vaccine. However, the law contains a provision that would allow the state Health and Human Services commissioner to add COVID-19 vaccines to the list of mandatory inoculations for K-12.
Lang also said that the decision to inoculate or not should be up to individuals, not the government.
“This comes down to the autonomy of the body,” Lang said, although he added that people who choose not to get vaccinated need to be even more scrupulous about observing mask-wearing and social distancing measures.
New Hampshire is among 44 states that allow parents to choose not to be vaccinated at school for religious reasons or personal beliefs. Lang noted that such requests are often granted, even for infectious diseases such as measles and mumps. But he fears that might not be the case with a COVID-19 vaccination mandate.
In Louisiana, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards imposed COVID-19 vaccinations in schools in November, despite objections from a legislative group. The policy will go into effect next fall, assuming the FDA has granted full clearance.
“It’s worth noting,” Edwards wrote to lawmakers, “that while many of the diseases on the public health vaccination schedule were once rampant and deadly, they are no longer serious risks to school-age children in Louisiana. This is true because almost everyone was vaccinated against these diseases, many as a condition of attending primary school. “
The history of one such disease, polio, suggests that it may be several years before schools across the country impose the COVID-19 vaccine.
As of the end of December, COVID-19 had killed 678 children, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 0.08 percent of all deaths in the United States. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, less than 1.7 percent of COVID-19 cases in children have resulted in hospitalization and less than 0.03 percent have resulted in death.
In contrast, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before the introduction of the polio vaccine, most of the roughly 35,000 Americans who were disabled each year by the dreaded disease were children. In summer, when the virus seemed to be at its peak, many terrified parents were afraid to let their children go to swimming pools, beaches, movie theaters or other community gathering places.
The polio vaccine was widely hailed as a scientific miracle, and many parents rushed to inoculate their children as soon as it became available. Yet by 1963, only 20 states, other than the District of Columbia, had required children to be vaccinated against polio, or any other vaccine, in order to attend school.