How protests help defeat COVID vaccine mandate in schools

The District of Columbia announced the school vaccine mandate in July 2022 shortly after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for ages 12-15, but low compliance, grassroots pushback and threats of more lawsuits may have led to its cancellation before implementation.

In announcing the decision, the Council of the District of Columbia noted that no state has mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for schoolchildren, that the public health emergency has ended and that not attending school has detrimental effects for children.

Commenting on the news, Kim Mack Rosenberg, acting general counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD) said “While I believe that mandates — whether in D.C. or elsewhere — were legally problematic from the outset, the council’s decision to now remove the mandate is an important step to remedy a mandate that should never have been imposed.”

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“However, parents need to be vigilant in the future to protect their children from similar attempts to control access to education and the classroom by essentially forcing children to take unwanted medical treatments.

“Education is essential to children’s success, and to condition access to education, especially by mandating an experimental product is, simply put, unacceptable.”

Rolf Hazlehurst, senior staff attorney, told The Defender the mandate was rescinded as an outcome of extensive grassroots organizing by families and legal work by CHD.

“CHD is proud to have worked closely with a grassroots movement of parents, including the plaintiffs in Booth V. Bowser, who stood up for the children of DC against the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

“If the COVID-19 vaccine mandate had not been repealed, by the start of the school year, CHD and parents were prepared to challenge the mandate in a court of law.”

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District education leaders informed parents that students who did not receive the vaccine within the first 20 days of the school year would be prohibited from attending school and reported to the district’s Child and Family Services agency.

In July 2022, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., then-chairman (now chairman on leave) for CHD, sent Grant a letter asking her to rescind the program or CHD would sue to overturn the mandate.

D.C. law requires students in all area schools, including private, parochial and independent schools, to be fully compliant with mandated vaccinations, unless they have an approved exemption. The law also requires schools to verify immunization certification for all students.

Washington State halted its plans to mandate the vaccine for children in April 2022. Louisiana ended its plans to mandate the vaccine for children in May 2022. And California, which was the first state to announce it would require COVID-19 vaccinations for children, ditched its plans for a mandate in February of this year.