With the pandemic emergency quickly winding down, California officials appear to have quietly backed away from plans to require COVID-19 vaccinations for K-12 school students, a move that avoids the prospect of barring tens of thousands of unvaccinated children from the classroom.
The shift comes 14 months after Gov. Gavin Newsom visited a San Francisco middle school to declare plans to make California the first state to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for its more than 6 million students.
The vaccine mandate, initially expected to kick in last summer, was put off another 12 months amid flagging youth vaccination rates that opened a debate over how the requirement would disproportionately punish disadvantaged students already struggling to recover academically and emotionally from pandemic school lockdowns.
Now, with no announcement or explanation, the administration appears to be quietly dropping the COVID-19 immunization mandate altogether. The education news site EdSource reported Feb. 1 that the state would no longer pursue it, citing unnamed officials. When the Bay Area News Group asked whether the state was dropping plans for the mandate, the California Department of Public Health would not directly answer but did not dispute the EdSource report, noting that “emergency regulations are not being pursued.”
“The legislature considered this issue last year and did not enact legislation mandating COVID-19 vaccines for K-12 students,” the CDPH said in a statement. “The state’s COVID-19 state of emergency will terminate later this month, and per the recent announcement by the federal government, the federal public health emergency will end in May.”
Newsom’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
But school officials like Superintendent Eric Volta of Contra Costa County’s Liberty Union High School District weren’t surprised and didn’t expect the mandate would ever materialize for logistical and practical reasons.
“I would…
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