In Praise of Vaccine Mandates
LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) required all of its 73,000 school employees to get vaccinated for Covid 19. It gave them ample time and assistance. All but 500 got vaccinated or secured the necessary exemption. That’s a compliance rate of over 99%. A great deal of praise goes to the School Board, the unions, and the administrators and leaders of LAUSD. This makes schools much safer for students and teachers and their multi-generational families alike.
This week, the 500 LAUSD employees who refused to be vaccinated without an exemption for a medical condition or a sincerely held religious belief were let go. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/lausd-fires-500-unvaccinated-employees/2775132/ Many of the unvaccinated teachers were reassigned to the City of Angels program which offers online education to those students who are not ready to come back to schools in person.
Next month, the LAUSD vaccine mandate for students over the age of 12 kicks in. Out of over 500,000 students, there are still 33,000 who have not yet completed all their vaccinations. The compliance rate is already at 85% reports LAUSD. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/lausd-fires-500-unvaccinated-employees/2775132/ Two groups, the California chapter of Children’s Health Defense and Protection of the Educational Rights of Kids, have sued LAUSD to block the student vaccination mandate. Their request for a temporary restraining order was denied and the judge indicated that they were unlikely to prevail on their request for a preliminary injunction. The LAUSD Board just decided to postpone the deadline to the next semester, concluding that their City of Angeles on line learning program lacked the teacher capacity to absorb and educate the 33,000 teenagers who had still not gotten their shots.
There are long standing Supreme Court precedents upholding state and local government’s ability to require their residents to get vaccinated; the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently held that emergency federal OSHA regulations requiring large employers to get their employees vaccinated were beyond OSHA’s statutory authority. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/18/bidens-vaccine-mandate-will-likely-go-to-the-supreme-court-heres-how-the-courts-have-ruled-before.html A federal District Court judge in Georgia this week issued a nationwide injunction against the Biden Administration’s requirements that all federal contractors require their employees to get vaccinated. These cases will have to be resolved by the US Supreme Court where precedents going back to the early 20th Century have upheld governmental vaccination mandates; these precedents arose in the context of state and local governments’ public health rules. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/the-supreme-court-vaccine-case-jacobson-v-mass-explained
Public opinion is strongly in favor of these requirements; however, Republican voters are not at all supportive of them. https://news.gallup.com/poll/354983/majority-supports-biden-covid-vaccine-mandates.aspx
You might and should ask why do we even need a mandate? In the first place, this is a highly transmissible disease resulting too frequently in hospitalization and death. Second, there is a massive disinformation campaign spread over the internet by people seeking to profit from quack cures and treatments, and to rouse widespread public doubt about the efficacy and safety of the vaccines. Lastly certain politicians and popular media personalities are doing their best to dissuade the public from the sorts of behavior as masking, vaxxing and social distancing needed to stop the spread of the deadly virus. As a little kid, I went through and remember the scares of the polio epidemic, the development and distribution of the polio vaccines. The scare campaigns then were derived from Senator Joe McCarthy’s rantings about the communist menace lurking everywhere, thank heavens he had not hit upon vaccine hesitancy.
Reference: LAUSD Fires 500 For Not Getting Vaccinated, Los Angeles Times (12/9/21)
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 12/10/21