Washington Revokes Plan to Punish Students Refusing COVID-19 Vaccination

Empty chairs at Paularino Elementary School, of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, in Costa Mesa, Calif., on Aug. 21, 2023. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

The District of Columbia (D.C.) scrapped its plans to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on school children that threatened to exclude unvaccinated students from classes.

On Tuesday, the D.C. Council voted to repeal the COVID-19 vaccination mandate, with all 13 members approving it. The vaccine mandate was instituted by the D.C. Council in 2021 through a bill that amended a 1979 immunization law by adding COVID-19 vaccines to the list of required immunizations for children. Families were to be given 20 days from the date of notification of non-compliance to get their child vaccinated, failing which the child would be barred from attending classes.

The law was supposed to be enforced from the 2022–23 school year, with parents required to submit their children’s vaccination certificates as proof of having fulfilled the mandate.

However, after many families did not get their children vaccinated against COVID-19, the D.C. Council extended the deadline to Jan. 3 this year.

On Nov. 1, 2022, the Council voted to delay the mandate to the 20–2024 school year, saying they would review the vaccination requirement. And finally on Tuesday, the Council revoked the vaccine mandate.

A Sept. 19 report published by Council Chairman Democrat Phil Mendelson insisted that “widespread misinformation has caused many of our students’ families to distrust the COVID-19 vaccine or believe that infection with this virus is trivial.”

“In June of 2022, 27 percent of students in District schools were noncompliant with required immunizations. By this June, that measure had dropped to 20 percent,” it said.

The report pointed out that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has changed its guidance on COVID-19 vaccination. While the agency “strongly recommended” that school-age kids be vaccinated, it “does not recommend that it be required,” the report said.

“Indeed, as of this report there are few, if any jurisdictions in the country, including school districts, that require a COVID vaccination. What seemed prudent only months after the vaccine became available, and in the midst of the Delta-variant, surge, is no longer considered to be best practice.”

The vaccine mandate had faced fierce opposition from Republican lawmakers. “DC schools plan on kicking children out of school based on their COVID vaccination status. Leftists would rather deprive your child of an education than end their forever pandemic,” Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said in an Aug. 4, 2022, post on X.

In September last year, Ms. Blackburn and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) introduced a bill to end the vaccine mandate. Mr. Cruz insisted that the policy was “blatantly discriminating against black students in our nation’s capital.”

“The rate of vaccination for black students between the ages of 12 and 15 in Washington, D.C. is 60 percent—far lower than the city average. D.C. schools has already postponed enforcement of this racist policy until 2023 and they should simply scrap it.”

There were also concerns that the mandate risked negatively affecting the education of children whose learning may have been disrupted due to the pandemic and related lockdowns.

Unnecessary Vaccination

The CDC has recommended COVID-19 vaccinations for children as young as just six months old. According to a Sept. 12 press release by the agency, COVID-19 vaccination is necessary “to protect against the potentially serious outcomes of COVID-19 illness this fall and winter.”

However, some experts disagree with such an assessment.

In an interview with The Epoch Times in September last year, cardiologist Peter McCullough said that while it makes sense to vaccinate children for “horrible” diseases like polio, he finds it meaningless to inject them with COVID-19 vaccines as the SARS-CoV2 virus does little to no harm to children.

“We would never vaccinate against the common cold,” he said. Dr. McCullough believes healthy children should not be given COVID-19 shots as the percentage of children who die from the infection is minuscule. On the flip side, the adverse effects of the vaccine among the demographic are a cause of concern, he added.

In an Oct. 19 interview with The Highwire program, Dr. McCullough said that the “leading cause of immune system dysregulation right now is hypervaccination.”

Hypervaccination is the repeated inoculation of an individual who has already been immunized. In people with immune system dysregulation, the body becomes incapable of controlling or restraining an immune response.

“There have been an incredible acceleration and intensification of vaccines given to children,” Dr. McCullough said. There are now “over 200 peer-reviewed papers suggesting that immune system dysregulation is related to neuropsychiatric diseases including attention deficit disorder, Asperger’s, autism spectrum disorder.”

Low Vaccination Rates

Data from the CDC show that vaccination rates of updated COVID-19 shots among children are very low. An agency survey showed that only 2.1 percent of American children took the updated shot by mid-October. Parental intent to get their child vaccinated was found to be “mixed.”

Over 37 percent of parents said their children would “probably or definitely” not get the COVID-19 shot. Race-wise, the proportion was highest among white parents, with 44.6 percent of respondents agreeing to it.

The World Health Organization (WHO) only recommends COVID-19 vaccination among children aged six months and older if the children have “serious immunocompromising conditions” or they have “severe obesity or comorbidities that put them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 infection.”

The WHO classifies healthy children between the ages of six months and 17 years as a “low priority group,” stating that “vaccinating this group has limited public health impact.”