Covid Vaccine Mandates Heighten School Inequity

Black children are less likely to have received the shots, which have little pediatric benefit to the otherwise healthy

By Eliza Holland and Nikki Johnson. Dr. Holland and Dr. Johnson are pediatricians. Excerpts:

"These mandates raise serious questions about racial inequity. In Washington, 36% of children 12 to 15 and 43% of 16- and 17-year-olds have received three shots of a Covid vaccine. For black children, those rates are only 23% and 31%, respectively. Roughly 60% of school enrollment is black. In New Orleans, 77% of public-school children are black and 52.5% of children 5 to 17 have completed their Covid vaccine series. (New Orleans doesn’t break the numbers down by race.)

If school began today and the mandates were strictly enforced, at least two-thirds of black adolescents in Washington and almost half of all children in New Orleans wouldn’t be allowed in the classroom."

"there is ample evidence that online schooling and pandemic education have been an abject failure—especially for black students. At the end of the 2020-21 school year, students of all races had fallen behind by an average of four months in reading and five months in math. For students in low-income schools, the learning loss was closer to seven months. Remote learning widened the white-black achievement gap that had been closing for 30 years."