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The Department of Education will not require city kids to get vaccinated before the upcoming school year, Mayor de Blasio said Tuesday.
The declaration came the day after both the CUNY and SUNY systems announced that students would have to receive the COVID-19 shot before enrolling in the fall.
“We look forward to welcoming back every single student,” de Blasio said at his daily briefing. “I think you’ll see a lot of students and a lot of staff vaccinated by then. But I think that’s the right way to go about it.”
Hizzoner was asked if there were any parallels to be drawn with other vaccines that are required to enroll in schools, including measles shots.
“I talked about it with the health team,” he said. “We just don’t think it’s the right way to go at this moment,” adding that he’s open to “making adjustments” as the situation evolves.
While the city won’t mandate the jab for schooling, de Blasio said Monday that he wants to ramp up efforts to vaccinate kids in the 12 to 15 age range as those shots become available.
“We want to immediately get to work vaccinating young people who now can get the vaccine,” he said. “We’ll use all the existing centers that have the right vaccine, for sure, including on a walk-in basis. We’re going to constantly look for the right ways to do things. So, right now we do not have a vaccination effort directed to schools, but we might do something with that going forward.”
American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten told Fox News this week that her organization would not push to require kids to get vaccinated before the fall.
But she also espoused administering the shot to adolescents while maintaining COVID-19 safeguards in schools next academic year.
“That’s why you’d still have to have some mitigation,” she said, adding that eventually “we have to get our kids vaccinated.”
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