California Drops Plan For Children’s Covid Jab Mandate
(Niamh Harris) California state leaders have quietly abandoned plans to impose Covid vaccine mandates on schoolchildren.
The decision reverses a state policy first announced by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. The policy has been scrapped now that Newsom has decided to allow a three-year-old “state of emergency” to expire at the end of February.
It has become difficult for lawmakers to continue to justify vaccine mandates given their known ineffectiveness and in many cases high risk of adverse reactions.
InfoWars reports: California’s Department of Public Health confirmed Friday that K-12 school students will no longer be required to take the experimental COVID jab to attend class.
“CDPH is not currently exploring emergency rulemaking to add COVID-19 to the list of required school vaccinations, but we continue to strongly recommend COVID-19 immunization for students and staff to keep everyone safer in the classroom,” the department said in a statement. “Any changes to required K-12 immunizations are properly addressed through the legislative process.”
From CBS Bay Area:
Gov. Gavin Newsom first announced the policy in 2021, saying it would eventually apply to all of California’s 6.7 million public and private schoolchildren.
But since then, the crisis first caused by a mysterious virus in late 2019 has mostly receded from public consciousness. COVID-19 is still widespread, but the availability of multiple vaccines has lessened the viruses’ effects for many — offering relief to what had been an overwhelmed public health system.
Nearly all of the pandemic restrictions put in place by Newsom have been lifted, and he won’t be able to issue any new ones after Feb. 28 when the state’s coronavirus emergency declaration officially ends.
One of the last remaining questions was what would happen to the state’s vaccine mandate for schoolchildren, a policy that came from the California Department of Public Health and was not impacted by the lifting of the emergency declaration.
The vaccine mandate for K-12 students was initially expected to go into effect last summer, but was delayed for 12 months over concerns about discrimination against unvaccinated students amid relatively low vaccination rates.
“At the time, thousands of middle and high school students were still unvaccinated and in jeopardy of being disenrolled,” Redlands Daily Facts reported.
