A California Supreme Court ruling last week reaffirmed that individual school districts do not have the authority to require students to get vaccinated against COVID-19. A few weeks earlier, officials in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration had shown they had abandoned plans to require schoolchildren. get vaccinated against COVID, and the law with a similar effect was eliminated last year. That means, at least for the foreseeable future, COVID vaccines are unlikely to be added to the list of 10 vaccines California wants to move to school.
Some may worry that this puts children and communities at risk. But our current clinical understanding of COVID-19 vaccines and the drawbacks of making them mandatory suggest that state officials and courts have made the right decision.
Unlike other vaccines required for school enrollment in California, COVID vaccines are not reliable in preventing infection or transmission, providing modest coverage rather than infection for only a few months.
Conversely, vaccines already required for school attendance, such as those against measles, mumps, rubella, and polio, reliably prevent outbreaks when local vaccination rates exceed a safe threshold. years, reducing the threat of long-term transmission. The tetanus vaccine only provides individual ions, but is given in combination with diphtheria and pertussis vaccines, which opposes long-term epidemics.
We have never had any evidence that COVID vaccines would be presented as vaccines that provide a high degree of lasting coverage against infection and transmission, conferring so-called herd immunity. It is clear that they would not be from 2021 and even more so since the emergence of the Omisron variant. One study found that after about five months, the rate of COVID infection among vaccinated and unvaccinated teens eventually remained necessarily the same. And COVID vaccines also don’t seem to decrease the chances of other inflamed people infecting others. .
To be clear, there is evidence that COVID-19 vaccines have provided individual coverage rather than serious illness and death. But the risks for most children at this level are low. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 96 percent of children have become inflamed with the virus, and studies continue to show that postinfectious or “natural” immunity is at least as protective as vaccine-induced immunity.
In addition, a recent study of the Omicron variant in England found a COVID death rate among those under 20 of just 2, equivalent to 1 million infections. It also found that no children with past infections had died from the upcoming SARS-CoV-2 infection. The COVID-related condition known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) has thankfully disappeared completely, and studies continue to show that prolonged COVID is rare in children.
Some young people are more at risk for COVID than others. However, the absence of a state mandate will discourage families and doctors from deciding to vaccinate these young people.
My own youth and young adult studies threat and benefit analyses address individualized approaches to COVID vaccination that compare expected benefits with known prospective side effects. A well-defined vaccine-related threat is myocarditis, or inflammation of the central muscle, which occurs disproportionately in adolescent males and young adults with potentially serious and long-lasting consequences. A high-quality prospective study estimated that the side effect would occur in about 1 in 3,3000 men aged 13 to 18 who would receive a momentary dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Therefore, the school mandate would require many young people to take on known threats in exchange for dubious benefits.
For the foreign context, schools and universities in Europe sometimes do not require COVID vaccination. The European CDC aims to offer bivalent withdrawal to others aged 60 and over or who have underlying situations that put them at high risk. Only in Britain does it give withdrawals to other people over 50, who run in nursing homes or otherwise at high risk. France has just announced that starting next fall, it will not propose vaccinating other people under 65 who are not considered to be at maximum risk.
A statewide vaccination mandate also threatens to send thousands of students back to distance learning. That’s why the Los Angeles Unified School District has indefinitely extended its January 2022 deadline for students 12 and older to get vaccinated against COVID. It has become transparent that more than 30,000 unvaccinated academics may simply be excluded from classrooms, disproportionately affecting other young people of color who had already suffered major educational setbacks during the pandemic.
With COVID vaccination rates in California increasing by about 68% among 12-16 year olds, 38% among 5-11 year olds, and 8% among those under 5, mandatory vaccinations in California schools may worsen the decline in public school enrollment, which puts additional pressure on the budgets of troubled districts whose students are, once again, the most disproportionately vulnerable.
Restore public acceptance as true with calls for practices that weigh the expected benefits of any intervention rather than the potential harm. A school COVID-19 vaccination mandate would not particularly reduce the health risks to our children or communities, but it could unnecessarily exclude students. of the study rooms where they want to be.
Tracy Beth Høeg is an epidemiologist at UC San Francisco and a physician. These perspectives are his.
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