By Rishma Parpia – The Vaccine Reaction
District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) students who failed to get the school district’s mandated vaccines were prohibited from attending school beginning Dec. 5, 2023. At the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, 23,000 DC public school students had not received all the mandated vaccines.1
Although the school vaccine mandates have always been in place in Washington, DC, they were not as strictly enforced in the past as the current policy. Nathaniel Beers, MD, a pediatrician and executive vice president of community and population health at Children’s National Hospital said:
This is the first year that the DC Health Department and DC schools have decided to actually keep children out of school due to their vaccination status. There’s been a large push for a while about making sure kids are vaccinated in school.2
The Office of the State’s Superintendent of Education released a statement saying…
District law requires students in all DC schools, including private, parochial, and independent schools, to be fully compliant with required vaccinations to attend school and that schools verify immunization certification for all students as part of enrollment and attendance. These laws, in place in all 50 states, have been on the books since the 1970s.3
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans avoided medical settings and missed routine doctor appointments due to lockdowns and ongoing social distancing restrictions that were part of the government’s response to the pandemic, which meant many children did not get the all the vaccines recommended by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) officials. However, even in the months after students returned to schools, the vaccination rates remained lower that the targets set by District of Columbia health officials.4
In contrast to students in Maryland and Virginia, even before the pandemic social distancing restrictions, the District of Columbia has had lower vaccination rates.5 About one-third of students in DC had not received all of the city-mandated vaccines required for school attendance in the weeks leading up to the start of the 2023-24 school year.6
Nathaniel Beers, MD, commented on the efforts to get children vaccinated…
There has been a concerted effort in the pediatric community to try and reengage with families but there still have been some families who we have been unable to get caught up.7
DC Parents Not Happy That Children are Barred from School
Students from Jackson-Reed High School in Ward 3 and King Elementary School in Ward 8 in Washington, DC were told to go home on Dec. 5, 2023 after arriving at school when they were identified as not having received the mandated vaccines. Parents said this is the first time it has happened.8
Nurse assistant Takeyiah Riggins, whose five-year-old daughter was not allowed to attend school at King Elementary School, said that the school did not send her any warnings about her daughter missing the required vaccines. “I had to stay home and miss work. I feel like they should have some understanding,” she said.9
Emily Mechner’s 16-year-old son was turned away from Jackson-Reed High School because he did not get the second dose of the meningococcal ACWY vaccine. Emily expressed the opinion that sending kids home without warning for missing a dose of a required vaccine looks like it was designed to “make examples out of people.” She stated:
The system has been very casual about it for all of the years my kids have been in DCPS. No one really ever cared before if they were a few months behind. I don’t think it’s right to make examples out of people or to kick them out of school for this.10
One can easily minimalize this with a call to “Homeschool.” And yes, they’d be right to call for that. But behind this we see a glimpse of the communism they’re throwin’ at us. Yeah, once again, this is what communism looks like.
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Get shots and you die, don’t get shots you live – lesson learned. Teach that in school, home schooled kids and parents learned from the last science experiment.
The “must get vaccinated” garbage was just another reason we Home Schooled both children (another was Social Security Number requirement thanks to GHW Bush) in the 90s and 2000s.