INDIANA – COVID-19 vaccines will be part of recommended immunization schedules in 2023 for both children and adults, after a unanimous vote by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
That doesn’t make the vaccines mandatory for anyone, a point that was emphasized in a discussion before Thursday’s vote. The board members addressed concerns from the public that adding Covid-19 vaccinations to the schedule would force schools to require the shots.
“We recognize that there is concern around this, but moving COVID-19 to the recommended immunization schedule does not impact what vaccines are required for school entrance if any,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, a committee member and director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Indeed, there are vaccines that are on the schedule right now that are not required for school attendance in many jurisdictions, such as seasonal influenza. Local control matters and we honor that. The decision around school entrance for vaccines rests where it did before, which is at the state level, the county level, and the municipal level if it exists at all. They are the arbiters of what vaccines are required, if any, for school entry. This discussion does not change that.”
In fact, COVID-19 vaccines are explicitly banned from being included in school mandates in at least 20 states. Only California and the District of Columbia have announced that COVID-19 shots will be among the mandated vaccinations for students, but those mandates were not implemented for this school year.
It’s been nearly a year since eligibility for the COVID-19 vaccine was expanded to include everyone in the US 5 and older, but coverage among children still lags behind that of adults. Even as these vaccines and the related mandates have become highly politicized over the course of the pandemic, experts say vaccine hesitancy among parents isn’t new.
Although the COVID -19 shot will not become mandatory for school, all 50 states do have laws requiring specific vaccines for students – most of which include shots for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP) and varicella.
Uptake for these vaccines, mandated by schools long before COVID-19, fell during the pandemic.
In the 2020-21 school year, vaccination coverage for kindergarteners fell to less than 94% – dropping below the overall target of 95% that was set as an objective by the US Department of Health and Human Services in the Healthy People project for the first time in six years.
A CNN analysis of the latest CDC data suggests that students in states with stricter school vaccine requirements are more likely to have their shots.
All school immunization laws grant exemptions to children for specific medical reasons. But 44 states and Washington, DC, also grant religious exemptions, and 15 states allow philosophical or moral exemptions for children, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
According to the CNN analysis, states that were stricter with exemptions were much more likely to still meet the 95% coverage target. In the 2020-21 school year, an average of about 96% of kindergarten students had their MMR vaccine in states that allowed only medical exemptions, compared with 92% of students in states that also allowed philosophical or moral exemptions.
The full effect of the pandemic on children’s routine vaccination rates isn’t clear: It will be another few months before the CDC shares national data for compliance rates for mandatory vaccinations in the 2021-22 school year, and schools are in the midst of outreach and programming to ensure that as many students as possible will continue through the 2022-23 school year up to date on their vaccines.
Information – CNN
