Children in California won’t have to get the coronavirus vaccine to attend schools, state public health officials confirmed Friday, ending one of the last major restrictions of the pandemic in the nation’s most populous state.
Gov. Gavin Newsom first announced the policy in 2021, saying it would eventually apply to all of California’s 6.7 million public and private schoolchildren.
But since then, the crisis first caused by a mysterious virus in late 2019 has mostly receded from public consciousness. COVID-19 is still widespread, but the availability of multiple vaccines has lessened the viruses’ effects for many — offering relief to what had been an overwhelmed public health system.
Nearly all of the pandemic restrictions put in place by Newsom have been lifted, and he won’t be able to issue any new ones after Feb. 28 when the state’s coronavirus emergency declaration officially ends.
One of the last remaining questions was what would happen to the state’s vaccine mandate for schoolchildren, a policy that came from the California Department of Public Health and was not impacted by the lifting of the emergency declaration.
Friday, the Department of Public Health confirmed it was backing off its original plan.
“CDPH is not currently exploring emergency rulemaking to add COVID-19 to the list of required school vaccinations, but we continue to strongly recommend COVID-19 immunization for students and staff to keep everyone safer in the classroom,” the department said in a statement. “Any changes to required K-12 immunizations are properly addressed through the legislative process.”
The announcement was welcome news for Jonathan Zachreson, a father of three who lives in Roseville. Zachreson founded the group Reopen California Schools to oppose many of the state’s coronavirus policies. His activism led to him being elected to the Roseville City School District board in November.
“This is long overdue. … A lot of families have been stressed from this decision and worried about it for quite some time,” he said. “I wish CDPH would make a bigger statement publicly or Newsom would make a public statement … to let families know and school districts know that this is no longer going to be an issue for them.”
Representatives for Newsom did not respond to an email requesting comment.
California has had lots of influence over the country’s pandemic policies. It was the first state to issue a statewide stay-at-home order — and other states were swift to follow.
But most states did not follow California’s lead when it came to the vaccine mandate for public schools. Officials in Louisiana announced a similar mandate, but later backed off. Schools in the District of Columbia plan to require the COVID-19 vaccine starting in the fall.
Republican U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a former member of the state Assembly who challenged Newsom in a failed recall attempt in 2021 over his pandemic policies, published a blog post declaring: “We won. To Gavin Newsom: You lost.”
Kevin Gordon, a lobbyist representing most of the state’s school districts, said he did not think the policy change was the result of political pressure by Republicans, but instead a reflection of the virus’s slowing transmission rates.
“The public’s appetite for these kinds of mandates is definitely not what it used to be,” he said. “If you started to now impose a heavy mandate when the amount of transmission is significantly lower than it was statewide, a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t work right now.”
Total Doses Distributed = 956,124,455. Total Doses Administered = 669,600,840. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 269,064,626. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 229,719,115.
At a news conference focused on toll relief back in December 2022, the governor further spoke about how he’s “willing to sign great life legislation.”
“That’s what I’ve always wanted to do,” said DeSantis, in reference to hardening abortion restrictions in the state.
Previously, Rep. Webster Barnaby (R-Deltona) filed a similar anti-abortion bill titled the “Florida Heartbeat Act” back in September 2021. House Bill 167, which died in session, prohibited physicians from performing or inducing abortion if a fetal heartbeat was detected or if a physician failed to conduct a test to detect fetal heartbeat.
Opponents of stricter abortion regulations have vocalized their concerns in courts and protests across Central Florida and the nation.
“Make no mistake: peoples’ health care and lives are on the line,” said Dr. Sujatha Prabhakaran, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida.
More than 1,000 people have pleaded guilty or have been convicted on federal charges of defrauding the myriad COVID-19 relief programs that Congress established in the early days of the pandemic. And more than 600 other people and entities face federal fraud charges.
But that’s just the start, according to investigators scheduled to testify Wednesday to a congressional committee as House Republicans mark the beginning of what they promise will be aggressive oversight of President Joe Biden’s administration.
The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is holding its first hearing in the new Congress on fraud and waste in federal pandemic spending. Congress approved about $4.6 trillion in spending from six coronavirus relief laws, beginning in March 2020 when Donald Trump was president.
“We owe it to the American people to get to the bottom of the greatest theft of American taxpayer dollars in history,” said Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the committee’s chairman.
The Government Accountability Office is expected to tell the committee that the number of cases of suspected fraud is certain to grow in the coming months. For example, the inspector general for the Small Business Administration has more than 500 ongoing investigations involving loan programs designed to help businesses meet operating expenses during the pandemic. The inspector general for the Labor Department continues to open at least 100 unemployment insurance fraud investigations each week.
The GAO said the more than 1,000 convictions related to COVID-19 relief fraud are one measure of how extensive it was. How much money was lost to fraud? That’s unknown, the GAO said, but it reported in December that an extrapolation of Labor Department data would suggest more than $60 billion in fraudulent unemployment insurance payments during the pandemic. The GAO also warned that such an extrapolation has inherent limitations and should be interpreted with caution.
Still, lawmakers are anxious to discern how much theft has occurred and what can be done to stop it in future emergencies.
“We must identify where this money went, how much ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what should be done to ensure it never happens again,” Comer said.
Some 20 inspectors general work collaboratively to investigate pandemic relief spending. Michael Horowitz, who chairs a committee Congress created in March 2020 to lead oversight of COVID-19 spending, is also scheduled to testify.
In his prepared remarks, Horowitz said the committee issued a fraud alert this week regarding the use of more than 69,000 questionable Social Security numbers to obtain $5.4 billion in pandemic loans and grants.
Also testifying is David Smith, an assistant director of the Office of Investigations at the U.S. Secret Service, who predicts that efforts to recover stolen assets and hold criminals accountable for pandemic fraud will continue for years to come.
President Joe Biden informed Congress on Monday that he will end the twin national emergencies for addressing COVID-19 on May 11, as most of the world has returned closer to normalcy nearly three years after they were first declared.
The move to end the national emergency and public health emergency declarations would formally restructure the federal coronavirus response to treat the virus as an endemic threat to public health that can be managed through agencies’ normal authorities.
It comes as lawmakers have already ended elements of the emergencies that kept millions of Americans insured during the pandemic. Combined with the drawdown of most federal COVID-19 relief money, it would also shift the development of vaccines and treatments away from the direct management of the federal government.
The coronavirus remains a global health emergency, the World Health Organization chief said Monday, after a key advisory panel found the pandemic may be nearing an “inflexion point” where higher levels of immunity can lower virus-related deaths.
Speaking at the opening of WHO’s annual executive board meeting, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “there is no doubt that we’re in a far better situation now” than a year ago — when the highly transmissible Omicron variant was at its peak.
But Tedros warned that in the last eight weeks, at least 170,000 people have died around the world in connection with the coronavirus. He called for at-risk groups to be fully vaccinated, an increase in testing and early use of antivirals, an expansion of lab networks, and a fight against “misinformation” about the pandemic.
“We remain hopeful that in the coming year, the world will transition to a new phase in which we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the lowest possible level,” he said.
Tedros’ comments came moments after WHO released findings of its emergency committee on the pandemic which reported that some 13.1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered — with nearly 90% of health workers and more than four in five people over 60 years of age having completed the first series of jabs.
“The committee acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic may be approaching an inflexion point,” WHO said in a statement. Higher levels of immunity worldwide through vaccination or infection “may limit the impact” of the virus that causes COVID-19 on “morbidity and mortality,” the committee said.
“(B)ut there is little doubt that this virus will remain a permanently established pathogen in humans and animals for the foreseeable future,” it said. While Omicron versions are easily spread, “there has been a decoupling between infection and severe disease” compared to that of earlier variants.
Committee members cited “pandemic fatigue” and the increasing public perception that COVID-19 isn’t as much of a risk as it once was, leading to people to increasingly ignore or disregard health measures like mask-wearing and social distancing.
