California Would Require Covid-19 Vaccine For All K-12 Students Under Proposed Bill

A new bill was announced Monday by a California state senator that would require all school children to be up to date on their vaccinations.

The Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, Connecticut has a mass vaccination center. Joseph Prezioso is a photographer for Agence France-Presse.

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The bill would add the Covid-19 vaccine to California's list of required inoculations for any child attending a California K-12 school.
If the bill is passed, it would supersede the mandate that only requires the vaccine for grades 7 to 12 and can be refused by parents through a personal beliefs exemption.
The mandate will not take effect until the FDA approves Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine for children ages 12 and up, as it is only emergency-approved for children ages 5-15.
The new bill would apply to any child ages 5 and up attending a California school and would take effect immediately regardless of the shot's authorization status and can only be refused through a medical exemption.

Despite opposition from anti-mandate groups, bills for other vaccine mandates have been passed in California.

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The bill was proposed by state Senator Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) and followed by another proposal from state Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco). A record number of California children were hospitalized with Covid-19 earlier this month, at one point seeing 90 admissions in a single day. This figure is still far below adult hospitalization rates. The state's positivity rate among children has dropped from its peak in the last few days, and school attendance has improved.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams told CNN that he is considering a requirement for students to have a Covid-19 vaccine. Adams said that in this country, we do immunizations for diseases. We are going to determine if we are going to roll that out.

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