Gavin Newsom is mandating masks to stop COVID. Why won’t he back real vaccine mandates?

When school officials in Sacramento and other districts decided to require students to be vaccinated against COVID, they no doubt braced for resistance from hesitant parents and anti-vaccination agitators. What they probably didn’t expect was to get it from the governor.

When asked last week about tens of thousands of students who had yet to comply with a looming vaccination deadline in Los Angeles, Gov. Gavin Newsom was quick to undermine school officials who are trying to lead families in the right direction.

Newsom, who just imposed a new mask mandate to try to stem a resurgence of coronavirus infections, could have acknowledged that school officials in Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento and other districts with such mandates had adopted the difficult but correct policy. He could have encouraged the holdouts to comply with the requirement for their own safety and that of their schools and communities.

But he didn’t. Instead, the governor suggested allowing droves of families to ignore the requirement, which would threaten to render the policy pointless.

“We need to fine-tune all this,” Newsom said of the Los Angeles mandate during an East Coast tour to promote his new children’s book. “You have to accommodate, and I have all the confidence in the world the school board will work to accommodate.”

The governor went on to approvingly note the gaping loopholes in his own statewide school vaccination requirement. To Newsom’s credit, it was the first such mandate in the country, but it isn’t expected to take effect for months because it’s contingent on full rather than emergency federal approval of vaccines for children. Moreover, as he pointed out, it allows exemptions for almost any reason:

“The mandate we put in place for the state of California includes personal (belief) exemptions, not just religious and/or medical exemptions, so there’s plenty of latitude for families to make decisions,” he said.

State Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, and other lawmakers have suggested they could introduce legislation to eliminate the exemption for “personal beliefs,” which allowed increasing numbers of families to flout long-standing requirements that students be vaccinated against other communicable diseases until Pan successfully championed legislation tightening the rules.

Sacramento City Unified School District officials are requiring students to be vaccinated by the end of January or return to remote learning. As of last month’s deadline to report their vaccination status, 74% of eligible students had not been vaccinated or had failed to report their status. By Monday, that figure was down to 57%.

Other districts with vaccination mandates have large numbers of students who have yet to comply. About 40% of Oakland Unified’s eligible students had yet to report being vaccinated as of the beginning of the month. Los Angeles Unified reached 86% compliance, but with over 30,000 students still facing a return to remote instruction, the district backed off it’s January deadline two days after Newsom’s comments.

The prospect of so many students returning to inadequate virtual learning and social isolation is troubling, but so is the idea of so many remaining unvaccinated and prolonging the danger to everyone. Given the evidence that the district deadlines and other mandates have improved vaccination rates, it would be unfortunate if Sacramento and other districts abandoned the effort thanks partly to the governor’s unhelpful stance.

Noting that schoolchildren are already required to be vaccinated against 10 other diseases, Newsom said during the book tour interview that “it’s highly ironic that you have governors in particularly red states preaching freedom against this vaccination but not preaching freedom against all the other vaccinations.” It’s equally ironic for Newsom to criticize those leaders while taking a pass on backing up bolder officials in his own state.

This story was originally published December 14, 2021 at 1:30 PM.