States want teachers vaccinated, but rollout has been slower than hoped.
Delays put quick school reopenings in question
Teachers should be among the essential workers next in line for a COVID-19 vaccine, an advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended last week. And some states plan to push for those vaccinations as a way to fast-track school reopenings.
The problem: The vaccine’s rollout has faced delays across the nation, raising the question of whether teachers will be able to get the shot in time to make a difference in the current school year.
In Ohio, Gov. Mike Dewine said in late December that school teachers and staff, plus people ages 65 and over, will be next up for the vaccine after health care workers, with a goal of getting students back in the classroom by March 1.
About 71% of Ohio students are either in remote learning or in a combination of in-person and online learning, the governor has said.
Teachers will be among those to get the first doses in Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey announced at the beginning of December.
“We want our schools open and our teachers protected,” he said. “We know that our teachers desperately want to get back into their classrooms.”
Educators in the state should have access to the vaccine by late January or early February, Dr. Cara Christ, director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, said Wednesday in a news conference.
But so far, the number of vaccines in people’s arms is far below expectations. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, acknowledged that only a few million vaccinations have taken place thus far.
“I believe that, as we get into January, we are going to see an increase in momentum” that allows the nation to catch up to the planned rollout, Fauci said Tuesday on CNN.
He added that he still hopes that by spring or summer, “anybody and everybody who wants to be vaccinated can be vaccinated.”
The U.S. so far has vaccinated just 2.5 million people and distributed 12.4 million doses of the two vaccines that have been granted emergency-use authorization, one developed by Pfizer Inc. with German partner Biontech and the other developed by Moderna Inc. That’s far below inoculation estimations of 20 million Americans by the end of December.
It’s unclear how these delays may affect the nation’s school reopenings.
But as Tennessee struggles to administer vaccines, whether teachers are vaccinated should not hold up schools from reopening, Tennessee Department of Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said Wednesday.
“We have almost nine, 10 months of data that shows that schools are not a primary or even a significant place of a transmission. We do not advocate overall for holding back on schools reopening until teachers are vaccinated,” she said.