All children 12 and older in Los Angeles public schools must be fully vaccinated against COVID by January 10, 2022, to attend classes, the local Board of Education unanimously decided on Thursday.
According to the text of the resolution approved by the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the rule would
Require all Los Angeles Unified School District (“LAUSD” or “District”) and charter school students on co-located LAUSD school facilities who are eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, excluding those students with qualified and approved exemptions and conditional admissions, to become vaccinated and provide proof of vaccination pursuant to the timeline outlined below and within the Resolution as a mandatory precondition to accessing LAUSD school facilities.
The Board outlines the plan on how the policy will be implemented:
- All students who are 12 years of age and older and are part of in-person extracurricular programs [sports, drama, chorus and band] must receive their first vaccine dose by no later than October 3, and their second dose by no later than October 31, 2021;
- All students who are 12 years of age and older must receive their first vaccine dose by no later than November 21, 2021 and their second dose by no later than December 19, 2021;
- All other students must receive their first vaccine dose by no later than 30 days after their 12th birthday, and their second dose by no later than 8 weeks after their 12th birthday.
Students who don’t provide proof of vaccination won’t be permitted to have in-person learning following the end of winter break on January 11, and will have to study remotely under the LAUSD’s independent-study program. The rule will affect 225,000 students in grades six through 12, as well as 17,000 students in independent charter schools that use LAUSD campuses. The district officials say some 80,000 of the students have not yet been inoculated.
To justify the measure, the L.A. educators said the whole world is facing a “life-threatening pandemic” that “caused considerable challenges for public schools.” The educators never mentioned the fact that children aged 0-17 are spared of the dangers of the virus, and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, have a 99.96-percent COVID survival rate, or that the disease is even less threatening to them than the seasonal influenza.
Echoing President Joe Biden’s statement that vaccine mandates are “not about freedom or personal choice,” board member Jackie Goldberg said, “I do not see this as your choice or my choice. I see this as a community necessity.” She went on to say that in the name of safety, people must do “things they’re not comfortable with, they’re not sure of, that may even contain some risk.”
But the risk the vaccines poses to children’s health is far from negligible. According to the CDC, chances of young male COVID mRNA vaccine recipients (aged 12-29) developing a heart inflammation are 21 times higher than in their unvaccinated peers. Girls are not spared the risk, either, and they are 5.5 times more likely to get heart problems after receiving a shot than their unvaccinated peers. Then, there is an unaddressed issue of the bio-distribution of the vaccines that may affect virtually any organ in the human body and may pose an especially high risk of affecting girls’ ovaries, per the Pfizer animal studies. It remains debatable if it is worth risking young people’s reproductive health to keep the already heavily vaccinated community “safe.”
One of the fathers who spoke at the LAUSD meeting reportedly implied that parents should be the ones making such critical decisions about their children’s health. “Can we sue the district if our child has secondary side effects that are negative?” he asked, but received no answer.
Omitting the issue of vaccine safety, Board Vice President Nick Melvoin said that their goal is “to keep kids and teachers as safe as possible, and in the classroom.” He continued by stating, “A medical and scientific consensus has emerged that the best way to protect everyone in our schools and communities is for all those who are eligible to get vaccinated,” even though the “consensus” is only shared predominantly by the federal bureaucrats at the CDC who, in the age of the pandemic and mass panic fueled by the media, reached unmatched heights of political power while a considerable part of the medical community — mRNA vaccines’ creator Dr. Robert Malone included — warns against the known and possible side effects of the vaccines, particularly for young people.
The move, however, was applauded by the Odis Johnson, Jr. executive director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, who said that the measure “could provide the model for a comprehensive school response to COVID mitigation, so that schools can move on to student academic and mental health recovery plans.” Meaning, the policy is to be implemented elsewhere.
New York City’s school system, the largest in the nation with 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 separate schools, so far has ordered its 20,000 athletes in high-contact sports to begin the vaccination process before competition starts. While New York does not mandate all students get jabbed yet, the move is not off the table, since New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on Wednesday that a mandate for students is “certainly an option,” especially if COVID rates rise.
Along with L.A. Unified, New York City and Chicago — the nation’s third-largest district — are among a growing number of school systems that have enacted COVID vaccine mandates for staff.
