Letetsia A. Fox, president of the Los Angeles 500 of the California School Employees Association, receives her first COVID-19 Modern Vaccination Survey from registered nurse Sosse Bedrossian, director of nursing services for LAUSD.
Al Seib | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
President Joe Biden on Tuesday urged that preference be given to the vaccination of teachers and school staff against Covid-19, with the aim of administering at least one shot to every educator and staff member across the country by the end of March.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has previously encouraged countries to prioritize the vaccination of teachers, but some public health specialists have criticized the agency for not making vaccination a prerequisite for the reopening of K-12 schools.
“Let me be clear, we can reopen schools if the right steps are taken even before employees are vaccinated,” Biden said in the White House on Tuesday. “But time and time again we have heard from educators and parents who are concerned about it.”
To help speed up the safe reopening of schools, Biden said: ‘let’s treat personal learning as the essential service it is and this means that essential workers, who provide the service, need to get educators, school staff, childminders to let them go. inent. ”
“My challenge to all states, territories and the District of Columbia is this: we want every educator, school staff and childminder to have at least one chance by the end of March,” he added.
Biden said he would use the federal pharmacy partnership, which has been established with retail pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens, to expand access to Covid-19 vaccines, to make the shots available to teachers and school staff before the K-12. This will give workers the opportunity to receive the vaccine, even in countries where they do not meet local requirements.
His statement is the strongest call to date and the most ambitious timeline offered by the federal government for states to prioritize educators and school staff, although it is not a mandate to do so. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, praised the president’s remarks as a concrete step toward reopening schools for personal learning.
“What a tremendous relief to have a president facing this moment of crisis,” Weingarten said in a statement. “Vaccinations are an important ingredient in reopening schools safely, and it is the administration that is taking the steps to create vaccinations for educators, which is good news for anyone who wants to learn in school.”
Because doses of the Covid-19 vaccine are deficient, the states ration it to preferential groups, mostly essential workers, the elderly, and people with immune systems. While the CDC makes recommendations on which groups should receive the vaccine first, states ultimately make their own decisions.
The CDC recommended that teachers be vaccinated in the phase 1b group, which includes everyone 75 and older, as well as ‘essential workers’. But some states have excluded teachers and school staff from their definition of frontline essential workers.
Although the country’s largest health agency recommends that countries vaccinate teachers, dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said that teachers who are not vaccinated may be an obstacle to the reopening of schools. She said if schools follow the public health precautions introduced by the CDC, teachers and staff can safely return to personal learning.
However, based on the parameters set out by the CDC, about 90% of the schools in the country are in provinces with a significant spread where the CDC says that it is not safe for schools to fully reopen to personal do not learn.