Giving anti-vaxxers a pass

THE ANNOUNCEMENT on Wednesday that all school students in forms four and up must attend classes in person come Monday has wider implications, not limited even to the well-being of the country’s children.

It represents a capitulation to anti-vaxxer sentiment in the country, and brings into question the State’s ability to meet its covid19 vaccination goals.

In addition to older students returning to classes next week, Minister of Education Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly also announced students in lower forms will also be expected to return next January, regardless of their vaccination status.

Come Monday, students will be returning a mere three weeks after the ministry’s experiment with partial return for the vaccinated began. Did the State give its approach enough time?

The minister said the ministry had come to its decision after considering the data in relation to vaccination rates among students.

Not only have insufficient numbers of students been vaccinated overall, but government schools have lagged behind denominational schools in terms of vaccination rates.

“For the denominational and private schools, the attendance averaged 80 per cent of the eligible cohort and continued to increase; in some cases, the attendance was a high as 95 per cent at the end of the two-week period,” she said.

Clearly such a situation raises the prospect of students in government schools suffering the most by being left further behind, ostensibly lending a sense of urgency to the need for drastic action.

The State likes to boast about providing quality education to all students regardless of their background, but the complex issue of uneven academic performance between government and denominational schools is a long-standing one, betraying such egalitarian notions.

It is worth carefully studying what denominational schools have been doing better than their government counterparts in terms of their approaches to encouraging vaccination.

Meanwhile, the ministry has made its decision based on data. On what basis are parents withholding their children from vaccination?

It is disturbing that various stakeholder groups have failed to exert influence in order to encourage vaccination rates to go up. Instead, they have completely ignored the reality of the covid19 pandemic and the practice of mandatory vaccination for schools which has been in place for decades.

They have also alleged discrimination on the basis of vaccination status, when it is clear that it is the right to life that trumps all considerations at this point in time. The right to personal choice must be balanced against collective responsibility. In the case of numerous other vaccines, the latter has always outweighed the former. Why should that be different in a deadly global pandemic?

The ministry's abrupt policy change will have at least one advantage, in that it removes the burden on students to have laptops and similar devices. It also simplifies teaching plans.

Yet the signal that has been sent does not bode well for the fate of the Government's “safe zones” and the vaccination programme as a whole.