In California’s battle against COVID, Gov. Gavin Newsom is still leading from behind

Three weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrated his resounding defeat of a recall attempt led by pandemic deniers, declaring that “science was on the ballot” and had emerged victorious, California got the sort of tough vaccine mandate the science recommends.

Unfortunately for those of us who don’t live in Southern California, it came from the Los Angeles City Council.

The city — and, a day later, Los Angeles County — joined San Francisco and other Bay Area jurisdictions last week in requiring proof of COVID vaccination for indoor places such as restaurants and salons. The local laws offered the latest reminder that if Newsom is leading a science-forward pandemic policy, he’s leading it from behind.

The city and county vaccine mandates vary in their sweep and stringency. San Francisco’s order, announced some two months ago, requires proof of vaccination for entry into high-risk places such as bars, restaurants, clubs, gyms, theaters and any indoor gathering of 1,000 or more; Los Angeles’ encompasses more indoor spaces, such as shopping malls and salons, but allows exceptions for those who claim religious objections and present a negative coronavirus test.

What all of them have in common, however, is that they’re much better than nothing, which is what most of the state is still settling for.

In the Sacramento region and beyond, Californians can still gather indoors regardless of vaccination status, including in bars, restaurants and other places shown to fuel the spread of the virus. This free-for-all includes the parts of the state with the lowest vaccination rates and therefore the greatest need for mandates to boost inoculation and prevent needless illness and death.

The governor did follow school districts in the Bay Area and Southern California last month in imposing a COVID vaccination mandate for schoolchildren, the first such statewide requirement in the country. But because it’s contingent on further action by the Food and Drug Administration as well as state health officials, Newsom’s order isn’t expected to take effect for months. Newsom also left a potentially gaping loophole for students and their families to claim exemptions based on “personal beliefs,” which have allowed dangerous numbers of students to skip the other vaccinations the state requires to enter day care, kindergarten and middle school.

A pre-pandemic legislative crackdown on unvaccinated students preserved the personal belief exemption for future vaccines, which limits the governor’s power to forgo such exceptions from COVID shots. But Newsom could have done more to narrow the loophole or call for the Legislature to do so.

The administration’s rules for state workers are similarly loose, allowing them to submit to regular testing for the coronavirus in lieu of vaccination. That permitted a majority of the state’s prison guards — more than two-thirds in some institutions — to remain unvaccinated as of last month despite the obvious danger to them and their prisoners. About 50,000 people have been infected with the virus in the state prisons, and at least 240 faced an extrajudicial death sentence as a result.

And yet Newsom, whose anti-recall campaign took millions of dollars in donations from the unions that represent prison employees, resisted requiring them to get vaccinated and, astonishingly, just appealed a federal judge’s order to do so.

Oakland-based U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar ruled that the failure of Newsom and other state officials to require vaccination of corrections employees had violated the Eighth Amendment’s proscription against cruel and unusual punishment. “Defendants are aware of a substantial risk of serious harm to incarcerated persons,” Tigar wrote, but “have nonetheless failed to reasonably abate that risk because they refuse to do what the undisputed evidence requires.”

From prisons to schools to bars, the governor has established a remarkably consistent pattern of failing to do what the evidence requires and what any honest assessment of the science demands.