Back-To-School Vaccines: Only 1 School System Requires COVID Shots

ACROSS AMERICA — For the most part, students heading back to school aren’t required to get COVID-19 vaccinations, despite chatter earlier this year encouraging mandatory inoculations to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in public schools.

Last year, as the omicron variant surged following holiday travel and gatherings, mandatory vaccinations were floated in several states and school districts to control the spread of the virus that, nationwide, has killed 1.03 million people since the pandemic began in 2020.

The only place in the country where students will be required to get vaccinated against the coronavirus as a condition of enrollment this fall is the District of Columbia. The requirement applies to “all students who are of an age for which there is a COVID-19 vaccination fully approved by the FDA.”

California considered similar requirements but backed away from a COVID-19 vaccine mandate last spring.

Legislatures in 20 states ban local school districts from requiring students to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

They are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

Only about 30 percent of U.S. children ages 5-11 are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. About 60 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds are fully vaccinated.

Overall, about 223 million people — or about 67 percent of the eligible U.S. population — have been fully vaccinated nationwide, including 107.5 million people who have gotten their booster shots, according to the CDC.

Will Students Mask?

The CDC relaxed its mask guidance in February, telling K-12 schools they could tie their local policies to the community rates of COVID-19 illnesses and hospital capacity, rather than the total number of COVID-19 cases.

Accordingly, schools are easing protocols to slow COVID-19 transmission, even as the BA.5 variant — the most contagious to date — quickly spreads across the country.

For example, only seven of the nation’s largest 500 school districts planned to require students and staff wear masks, according to the tracking company Burbio. That compares with 369 large school districts requiring masks in October 2021.

In part, the decline in mask requirements in big school districts is due to political pressure. In Georgia for example, Clayton County Public Schools can’t require students to wear masks because of a state ban, but it does require adults and visitors to wear face coverings.

“The goal is to be in person, face-to-face, as close to normal as possible,” Morcease Beasley, the district’s superintendent, told EducationWeek, an independent news organization that covers education and school issues. “Staff are being very supportive, visitors are being very supportive, and many students, while it’s not required of them, are wearing them as well.”

Pre-COVID Anti-Vax Tide

A tide of vaccine skepticism was sweeping the country before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, threatening to wipe out progress to eliminate measles, mumps and other childhood diseases decades after they were all but eradicated in the United States.

The bitterly polarizing issue pits public health officials and others in the medical profession — and a growing number of state lawmakers — against so-called “anti-vaxxers,” who often cite religious freedom, personal objections and government overreach in their decisions to delay vaccinations or not immunize their children at all.

Much of the current opposition to vaccines can be traced to a 1988 article published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet in which former British doctor Andrew Wakefield falsely linked the MMR vaccine to autism.

His co-authors and the journal all redacted it, and Wakefield lost his medical license over his claims. Though the claim has been debunked over and over, it still pops up on social media as fact, worsening fears of vaccine safety.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have laws on the books requiring that students be vaccinated against early childhood diseases, but most of them — 44, as of May — allow religious exemptions as well.

Additionally, 15 allow for philosophical exemptions for children whose parents object to immunizations because of personal, moral or other beliefs. Many states align their vaccine requirements with recommendations from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

State laws vary greatly in what they require. All states but Alabama require students to be vaccinated against hepatitis B. About a half dozen states or locations — Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York City, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island — require students to get an annual flu shot.

In general, kindergarteners ages 4-6 must be vaccinated against chickenpox; diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP vaccine); measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccine); and polio. By middle and high school, students should be vaccinated against meningococcal disease, human papillomavirus (HPV vaccine) and Serogroup B meningococcal infection.