Children from kindergarten to 12th grade in both public and private schools will be required to be inoculated against the coronavirus once the F.D.A. gives full approval.
California’s governor on Friday issued the nation’s first statewide Covid-19 vaccine mandate for schoolchildren, saying they would be required as soon as next fall to be inoculated against the coronavirus to attend public and private schools in the state. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order adds the coronavirus vaccine to other inoculations, such as for measles and mumps, that are required for nearly seven million students to attend K-12 schools in person. The mandate will first apply to seventh through 12th grades, and then kindergarten through sixth grades, but only after the Food and Drug Administration grants full approval to a vaccine for those age groups. The mandate is one of the largest announced during a coronavirus pandemic that has torn through the country, claiming more than 700,000 lives, disrupting education and hobbling the economy. Another sweeping order that requires health care workers to be vaccinated took effect on Thursday in California, following similar — and in some cases, even more stringent — mandates in New York, Rhode Island, Maine, Oregon and the District of Columbia. In Connecticut, state employees, school employees and child care workers have until Oct.4 to get at least one vaccine dose. And major corporations, including United Airlines and Tyson Foods, have mandated coronavirus vaccines for hundreds of thousands of workers. Preliminary data indicates the mandates are working to persuade holdouts who have continued to refuse vaccination, either because of misinformation or for religious or political reasons. (Many mandates have limited medical and religious exemptions.) But schools generally have been more cautious about mandates, in part because not all children have been authorized for a vaccine and because of the political ramifications that may come with forcing the hands of parents. Polling indicates that a healthy share of parents — about 40 to 50 percent by some estimates — have expressed hesitance about vaccinating their children.
