COVID-19 vaccination for 5-to-11-year-olds is finally a go. But even as the emergency-use-authorization process unfolded, so too did arguments over whether kids should (or would soon) be forced into getting shots. School mandates for new vaccines tend to lag behind CDC recommendations by about half a decade, but COVID-19 shots appear to be in the express lane.
The Los Angeles Unified School District—the nation’s second-largest—will require students 12 or older to be vaccinated by mid-December if they want to continue attending in-person classes. The entire state of California plans to mandate shots for all of its public- and private-school students as soon as vaccines are fully approved for them.
The most important benefit of mandatory COVID vaccination, as far as parents are concerned, would be its potential to prevent death. COVID-19 has, up to this point, caused relatively few deaths in children ages 5 to 11—66 from October 2020 to October 2021.
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But we routinely vaccinate schoolkids against diseases that were even less deadly before their respective vaccines were available. Chicken pox, for example, killed an average of 16 5-to-9-year-olds a year in the early 1990s; now all 50 states (as well as the District of Columbia) require that elementary schoolers be vaccinated against it.
