The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest district in the nation, plans to mandate the coronavirus vaccines for all eligible students this week. This is a mistake. Requiring the shots for adults who are independent and capable of making informed decisions is one thing, but forcing minors to get a vaccine that is still being tested to protect them from a virus that is not a threat to their health is wrong.
To be clear, I am pro-vaccination and have been vaccinated against COVID-19 myself. But I do not support subjecting children to a vaccine that we are still studying and testing, especially since children are not at risk of falling seriously ill or dying from COVID-19 in the first place.
Every vaccine comes with a risk — even those currently required by public school districts, such as the polio vaccine or the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. But the risks posed by those diseases far outweigh any risk associated with vaccination. It is much safer for children to get the vaccine, the side effects of which have been studied for years, than it is to risk contracting polio.
The same cannot be said of the COVID-19 vaccines. The risk of children falling seriously ill from COVID-19 is extremely low, while the long-term risks to them from the coronavirus vaccines are still unknown. A few of the immediate side effects identified by researchers are myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, and Guillain-Barré syndrome. Both of these side effects are rare, according to researchers, but many parents will look at the numbers and decide the vaccines aren’t worth it given the low risk.
In fact, a majority of parents of school-age children said in a recent survey they would not support schools requiring students to get the COVID-19 vaccines — even if the Food and Drug Administration approves the vaccines for younger children.
Schools already make these kinds of risk assessments every year. There’s a reason the polio vaccine is mandatory but, in most states, the flu shot is not — the risk from polio is much greater, and the disease is much more preventable.
The bottom line is that the coronavirus is not a big enough threat to children to justify a vaccine mandate. Parents should be allowed to weigh the risks themselves and decide what’s best for their children. That might be the vaccine, or it might not. Either way, that must be their choice.
