Gavin Newsom orders COVID-19 vaccines for eligible students in California schools

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Friday that California students will have to get vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to attend in-person classes once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorizes full approval of the shots for their age groups.

The mandate, the first of its kind in the United States, likely would take affect next year, according to his office.

Newsom announced the requirement at a San Francisco middle school, where he characterized vaccines as essential in curtailing a pandemic that has altered daily life for Californians for 20 months.

“We are all exhausted by this pandemic,” Newsom said. “We are exhausted by the seasonality of it. We are exhausted by the variants and mutations.”

The governor said the decision to wait until full FDA approval came from discussions with school leaders throughout the state. It gives them time to work with the governor’s office on a plan to implement the rules.

“We hope this encourages folks to get vaccinated,” Newsom said. “We have no trepidation, no hesitancy in encouraging local districts to move forward more expeditiously...we expect on the basis of other similar requirements that you’ll start to see an uptick in people getting vaccinated well before those dates that are established.”

The majority of California students have returned to in-person learning for the 2021-2022 academic year, per state data.

Students and faculty must wear masks in K-12 classrooms. Newsom in August announced a requirement for teachers to get vaccinated or submit to regular testing as a condition of employment.

With Friday’s announcement, teachers will now need to be vaccinated by the same deadline as students.

A handful of California school districts have already implemented varying vaccine mandates for eligible students and staff, including San Diego, Los Angeles and Oakland.

Newsom’s directive will add the COVID-19 vaccine to the California Department of Public Health’s list of required shots for school kids attending classes in person, which already include those that prevent measles, mumps and rubella, chicken pox and polio. Students cannot cite personal or religious beliefs to decline those vaccines under a 2015 law.

By contrast, Newsom said his administration will allow students to decline a COVID-19 vaccine because of personal beliefs.

California students eligible for vaccine

The new rule applies to both private and public schools and will be phased in by grade span: 7-12 followed by K-6. Once approved by the federal agency, students have to get vaccinated by the following term.

Those who opt out of the requirement will have to enroll in independent study. Districts can also move more quickly than the state’s guidance to implement a mandate.

Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases expert at the University of California, San Francisco, said Newsom’s latest rule will help keep those kids in the classroom after a year and a half of disrupted learning.

“What is experienced by many many parents right now is the chaos and mayhem of having someone in the class test positive, usually from the community, and have the remaining students be contacted with contact tracing and potentially go home for quarantine or isolation if they are positive,” Chin-Hong said. “I think that chaos and disruptions are not really great for learning and will definitely change when more people are immunized.”

Chin-Hong also said the coronavirus delta variant changed previous thinking on how susceptible kids are to getting sick. They can get severely ill with or die from COVID-19, Chin-Hong said, and even if that’s a rare occasion, the long-term effects are unknown.

Finally, Chin-Hong said that children play a key role in the effort to end the pandemic because they make up a significant portion of the population. Vaccinating kids also means increasing community immunity against widespread COVID-19.

Calvin Fleming, a Clovis Unified School District parent, also said he supports the new rule.

“I’m glad that Gov. Newsom is adding this vaccine to the long list of other vaccines that our kids are required to take to go to school,” Fleming said. “The vaccines are working, and mandates are probably the only way out of this mess.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends those 12 and up to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Currently, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is the only shot approved for these younger people. The company has submitted data to the federal agency for trials on vaccination of children 5 to 11.

Fifty-five percent of the 3.1 million Californians in the 12-17 age group are fully vaccinated, according to the state health department. Another 8.4% are partially immunized, while 36.5% are unvaccinated.

Republican criticizes vaccine mandate

Sen. Richard Pan, the Sacramento Democrat and pediatrician who’s written several of California’s tough vaccine laws for school kids, celebrated Newsom’s decision.

“Students who cannot be vaccinated because of age or medical condition and students who are at-risk for severe illness from COVID-19 are protected when the people around them are vaccinated,” Pan said in a statement. “In addition, education is disrupted when students are quarantined at home because of exposure and outbreaks and valuable school time and funds must be taken away from education to control COVID when students remain unvaccinated.”

Some California Republican lawmakers criticized Newsom’s order. Republican Assemblyman Kevin Kiley of Rocklin who ran to replace Newsom in the Sept. 14 recall election that the governor overwhelmingly defeated.

Kiley said Newsom has issued “hypocritical vaccine mandates.” The governor has shied away from a mandate for prison guards, whose union donated $1.75 million to Newsom’s campaign, but authorized rules for other workers and for children, Kiley said.

“There is no reason the Governor’s policy of ‘education’ and ‘access’ cannot guide vaccination policy in schools,” Kiley said in a statement. “At every turn, this Governor has let his top Special Interest donors dictate pandemic policy. It is an abuse of the public trust without precedent in our state’s history.”

Katie Jerkovich, a parent of Fresno Unified School District student, said she doesn’t believe the mandate will be enforced without a fight.

“It’s just the unknown right now. We don’t know so much. It’s just scary,” she said. ”Anybody who has a kid right now has got to be freaked out.”

This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 10:14 AM with the headline "Gavin Newsom orders COVID-19 vaccines for eligible students in California schools."