New Orleans COVID Vaccine Mandate For 5 Year Olds Will Force Kids To Miss School

Vaccine mandates in general, are indefensible.

Vaccine mandates for children are even more indefensible.

Unfortunately, numerous locations throughout the country are continuing to impose and potentially enforce these mandates on kids, contrary to all available scientific evidence and data.

Washington, D.C. has announced its vaccine mandate for those over 12 years old, which will keep substantial numbers of minority students out of school:

With the expected enforcement date approaching, D.C. appears to be heading toward expelling significant numbers of children for not complying with the nonsensical mandate.

But New Orleans is one-upping the city by bringing the age bar down lower. Beyond 12 year olds, the city is requiring kids as young as 5 to receive two vaccination doses.

The Wall Street Journal reported that 52% of those aged 5-17 in New Orleans have completed their vaccination series, meaning that nearly half the students in the city could be excluded from in-person schooling.

These policies will accomplish nothing other than furthering already disastrous educational results in recent years.

Kids were forced out of in person learning in 2020 and into 2021 based on "expert" incompetence and political cowardice.

This dealt a devastating blow to learning rates, with dramatic losses in both reading and math:

"At the same time, there is ample evidence that online schooling and pandemic education have been an abject failure—especially for black students. At the end of the 2020-21 school year, students of all races had fallen behind by an average of four months in reading and five months in math. For students in low-income schools, the learning loss was closer to seven months. Remote learning widened the white-black achievement gap that had been closing for 30 years."

Of course, these mandates come from the same city and school administrators who claim to be extremely concerned with "equity," which attempts to force all racial groups to achieve the same outcomes.

Now they're willing to hurt predominantly minority students by excluding them from school yet again.

77% of children in public schools in New Orleans are black, yet the city apparently has no issue removing huge numbers of them from in person education.

Even if the vaccines did not rapidly lose their effectiveness over time, or didn't struggle against newer variants, it would be unjustifiable to keep children out of schools given they're at remarkable little risk of serious complications.

But the vaccines do lose their effectiveness within a matter of months, especially against the Omicron variant and sub-variants.

Mandates for children are enacted simply to mollify terrified adults incapable of examining evidence except through the lens of political ideology. Many other countries have been extremely hesitant to authorize vaccines for kids, let alone mandate them.

But their heroes on the "Believe In Science" left support these policies and so they must continue, regardless of who they hurt in the process.

Parents who make the entirely reasonable and defensible decision to avoid a shot with minimal efficacy and potential for negative side effects will now see their children punished due to biased, purposeful incompetence.

Perfectly sums up the COVID policy era.

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Ian Miller is a former award watching high school actor, author, and long suffering Dodgers fan. He spends most of his time golfing, traveling, reading about World War I history, and trying to get the remote back from his dog. Follow him on Twitter @ianmSC