WITH THE FOOD AND DRUG Administration poised to approve the first coronavirus vaccine for use in the U.S. – the start of a major national effort to blunt the spread of a pandemic that’s taken the lives of nearly 300,000 Americans, paralyzed the economy and shuttered schools for millions of children – pediatricians and school and public health officials are bracing themselves for and bristling against the onslaught of questioners asking the one thing they don’t want to talk about. At least not yet, anyway.
Will children be required to get vaccinated against COVID-19 to return to school?
"You hear the questions about whether vaccines should be mandatory or not," says Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. "That's not the question to be asking right now."
"The questions to be asking right now are, 'Is it effective? Is it going to be free? Is it widely accessible?'" she says. "What we're not doing right now – regardless of what I personally think – we're not weighing in on whether a vaccine should be mandatory or not right now because that's not an appropriate question right now."
The caveats of "right now," "yet" and "at this moment" do a lot of heavy lifting in conversations about immunization requirements, and that's because the answer is complicated and not as straightforward as parents would probably like. Not only does it depend on where families live, as different states have different vaccination requirements for schools, but it also depends on drug companies enrolling more children in their trials in order to amass enough data to show – as CONTINUE READING: Will States Require Children Get a Coronavirus Vaccination to Return to School? | The Report | US News
