An advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted Thursday for the company to update its recommended vaccination schedules for uploading the COVID-19 vaccine, adding it to children’s schedules.
But before the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices vote, false claims that this would mean young people would have to be vaccinated to go to school were widely spread.
In reality, the CDC has the authority to set vaccination needs in schools, and the vote requires schoolchildren to be vaccinated. That is a resolution left to the states.
Here are the facts.
If CDC adds COVID-19 vaccination to the children’s immunization schedule, the shots will be passed to school.
The false claim gained momentum after it was shared via Fox News host Tucker Carlson this week.
“CDC is about to include the covid vaccine in the youth vaccination program, which would make vax mandatory for youth to attend school,” Carlson tweeted Tuesday night. The tweet included a segment of his screen where he started making the same claim. .
Another popular tweet also claimed that the CDC committee’s vote would make vaccination “mandatory for enrollment. “
But the public fitness company does not meet the school’s vaccination requirements. “States have the strength to enact state laws requiring vaccination, not the CDC,” said Wendy Mariner, professor emerita of fitness law, ethics and human rights at Boston University. They have the strength to legislate. “
CDC spokeswoman Kate Grusich said in an email that the company “only makes recommendations for the use of vaccines, while vaccination needs for school entry are decided through state or local jurisdictions. “
Grusich explained that the action aims to expedite medical recommendation for healthcare providers by adding COVID-19 vaccines to a single list of all recent legal, legal and routine vaccines.
“It should be noted that there are no adjustments in the COVID-19 vaccination policy,” he said.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is an organization that makes recommendations to CDC about vaccines.
His advice to update schedules, which included other revisions, has yet to be officially followed through the agency, and the replaced schedules may not take effect until 2023, Grusich said.
In a follow-up segment on Fox News via Carlson on Wednesday night, he returned to the issue and claimed the CDC “lied. “, needs, so that young people are educated. “
“For example, the Virginia Department of Health mandates that ‘vaccines be administered according to the CDC schedule,'” he said. He cited Massachusetts as another example.
But those states don’t list all vaccines on the calendar in their school requirements.
Virginia, for example, doesn’t require annual flu shots for kids to get into school, even though the vaccine appears to be on the CDC’s schedule. Neither does Massachusetts.
A Virginia Department of Health spokeswoman, Maria Reppas, said in an email that “there is no direct and rapid effect on the addition of the COVID-19 vaccine to the vaccination schedule over mandatory school vaccinations in Virginia. “Such adjustments to the needs of the school would require legislative or regulatory action.
Dr. William Schaffner, a vaccination policy expert and professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said he is not aware of any state requiring all vaccines on the school calendar.
“These are recommendations for pediatricians and family circle physicians when they care about children,” Schaffner said. “These are just recommendations; There are no automatic commands to follow.
Many states have also been reluctant to require vaccination against human papillomavirus, or HPV, though it appears to be on the formative years calendar, Schaffner said.
States can use the law to require express vaccinations or they can allow a state-owned company or local fitness entity to require express vaccinations for certain age groups, Mariner said. He added that some states come with personal schools when setting requirements, in other cases, personal schools may also require vaccinations voluntarily.
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