California teachers push for more than vaccines to reopen schools

As teachers move to the front of the line for the Covid-19 vaccine in California, teachers’ unions are coming out strongly in favor of additional safety measures not yet endorsed by public health experts in order to safely return to classrooms, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

“We cannot safely and fully return to face-to-face instruction without putting our public-school workers at the top of the (vaccine) priority list,” said Claudia Briggs, spokeswoman for the California Teachers Association. “But remember, right now there’s no research evidence that the vaccine alone eliminates or reduces transmissions. It reduces illness.”

Some health experts, however, say that the vaccine is the best mitigation to Covid-19 spread. George Rutherford, a UCSF infectious disease expert, said that increased ventilation, masks and social distancing will be far less crucial once teachers have the vaccine. But those protocols would need to remain in place for students who likely won’t be vaccinated.

Meanwhile, superintendents of several large California school districts this week criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom’s school reopening plan in a public letter, which is voluntary but includes financial incentives for schools to participate.

The plan includes vaccines for teachers as part of safely reopening schools, but it “leaves the definition of a ‘safe school environment’ and the ‘standard for reopening classrooms’ up to the individual discretion of 1,037 school districts, creating a patchwork of safety standards in the face of a statewide health crisis,” the letter reads.