Should States Be Allowed to Mandate Vaccines for School Attendance?
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends getting 29 doses of 9 vaccines (plus yearly flu and COVID-19 shots after six months old) for kids aged 0 to six. No U.S. federal laws mandate vaccination, but all 50 states require certain vaccinations for children entering public schools. Most states offer medical and religious exemptions; and some states allow philosophical exemptions. For more on school vaccine mandates, explore the ProCon debate.
PRO (yes)
Pro
“Folks, vaccination requirements work, and there’s nothing new about them. They’ve been around for decades. We’ve been living with these requirements throughout our lives. Students, healthcare professionals, our troops have been required to receive vaccinations for everything from polio to measles, to mumps, to rubella.
And the reason most people in America don’t worry about polio, measles, mumps, rubella is because they’ve been vaccinated.”
-White House, “Remarks by President Biden on the Importance of COVID-19 Vaccine Requirements,” whitehouse.gov, Oct. 7, 2021
CON (no)
Con
“For many, many years, I think parents were so gaslighted, and they were scapegoated, and they were vilified and marginalized, so that even parents of kids who were very, very badly injured, knew what happened to their kid, but they were just reluctant to talk about it. And I think now those days are over….
We – our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you’re walking down the street – and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do – I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.
If you’re one of 10 people that goes up to a guy, a man or a woman, who’s carrying a baby, and says, ‘Don’t vaccinate that baby,’ when they hear that from 10 people, it’ll make an impression on ‘em, you know. And we all kept our mouth shut. Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore. Confront everybody on it.”
-Daniel Dale, “Fact Check: Rfk Jr. Claimed He’s Never Told People To Avoid Vaccination. He Did – Less Than Two Years Ago,” cnn.com, July 21, 2023
Not Clear or Not Found
“I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or mask mandate from kindergarten through college.”
Editors’ Note: Trump was speaking specifically about COVID-19 vaccines and has not made his position about other vaccines for school kids clear.
-Kayla Jimenez, “Trump Vows To Cut Federal Funding for Schools Teaching CRT, Accommodating Transgender Students,” usatoday.com, Mar. 15, 2023