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City lawmakers voted on Tuesday to delay the enforcement of the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students in Washington, D.C., pushing off the mandate until next school year.
The vote is the second time the D.C. Council has delayed the vaccine requirement for schools since passing an order in December 2021 that mandated all students 12 years and older must be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to attend in-person classes. The legislation initially required students to show proof of vaccination within 20 days of the beginning of the school year, but lawmakers later pushed that back to Jan. 3, 2023, due to slow compliance.
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“We must make policy as realists, and the reality of the situation is that the information vacuum created by the pandemic also created opportunities for falsehoods to flourish,” said Councilmember Christina Henderson, who originally authored the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. “We have to meet people where they are, and many people still aren’t ready to accept this particular treatment. We also don’t want to exclude students from the classroom … after working so hard to get them back into school in person.”
Now the vaccine mandate is not set to be enforced until the 2023-24 school year, lawmakers announced Tuesday. In the meantime, the councilmembers who originally introduced the student vaccine mandate said they would be reviewing the legislation after expressing second thoughts.
“We went too far in requiring the mandate,” said Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who co-introduced the legislation with Henderson last year.
Henderson indicated last month she would seek to delay the vaccine requirement, conceding much has changed about what lawmakers know about the coronavirus since introducing the legislation last year. For example, D.C. Health officials have questioned whether COVID-19 vaccines should be made mandatory or if schools should only encourage the shots in the same way they do flu shots.
Some councilmembers pushed back on the delay, arguing another postponement would further erode compliance.
“By extending the deadline once again, we are jeopardizing our ability to enforce other vaccine mandates down the line, and we are unintentionally feeding into vaccine misinformation that they are not effective,” said Councilmember Brooke Pinto.
Families have already been slow to comply with the vaccine mandate, with roughly 44% of students in traditional public schools in the district still unvaccinated against COVID-19, Henderson said on Tuesday. That number was at 45% in September.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The future of the mandate is unclear, as Mendelson suggested on Tuesday that the council could do away with the legislation altogether.
“[The mandate] looked like something that would be picked up across the country,” he said. “We seemed to be in step and following the science. A year later, and where is the science? The CDC website does not say a mandate is what they recommend. The pandemic is evolving into more of an endemic.”
