Biden Says Teachers And School Support Staff Should Be Vaccination Priorities

Updated September 6, 2021

While good news has rarely come our way over the last year, one of the few bright spots in 2020 that gave us hope for the immediate future were the development of two COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer/ BioNTech and Moderna.

And while other vaccine candidates from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have yet to be approved for use in the United States, we had further reasons to breathe sighs of relief when it became clear that the existing vaccines were not only safe but still effective against the coronavirus variants we've seen thus far.

And of course, the promise of securing sufficient vaccine supplies to vaccinate 300 million Americans by July was even more encouraging.

But the ability of members of one of America's most crucial professions to access these vaccines seems to depend on where they live. And from the sound of that, the president is well aware of this fact.

On February 16, President Joe Biden held his first CNN town hall since becoming president in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Reddit | themachacker89

As CNN reported, some of the questions he received concerned how schools can safely reopen as the pandemic continues and whether school staff should be vaccinated before returning to class.

In response, Biden said that both teachers and the support staff within the education system should have priority status for vaccinations.

In his words, "I think that we should be vaccinating teachers. We should move them up in the hierarchy."

As for the support staff, CNN reported Biden as saying that the ideal reopening plan involves "Making sure that everyone from the sanitation workers... (and those that) do all the maintenance, that they are in fact able to be protected as well."

This town hall also saw Biden discuss the broad strokes of how he would envision safely reopening schools.

Reddit | Boyer_Voyer

According to CBS News, this would involve equipping both students and teachers with personal protective gear, seeing students return in smaller pods to make social distancing more feasible, and prioritizing reopening elementary and middle schools due to the observed higher rates of COVID-19 transmission among high school students.

He also floated the possibility of keeping schools open in the summer to make up for lost learning.

At the moment, the idea of vaccinating teachers as a priority group seems to be upheld on a state-by-state basis.

CNN reported that 28 states and the District of Columbia are in the process of granting some or all of their teachers access to existing COVID-19 vaccine supplies, but 22 states do not count teachers among the groups eligible for the vaccine at this time.

And it doesn't look like there's much President Biden can do about harmonizing these state priority lists to include teachers and school support staff.

Wikimedia Commons | Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin, State of Florida

According to CBS News, Biden said he can't force states to prioritize teachers. While he can make recommendations to that effect, the decision ultimately rests with each state's leaders.

He also reminded those watching the town hall that receiving enough vaccines for 300 million Americans by July does not mean each of these people will actually receive their doses that same month. Such a process takes time, after all.

h/t: CNN, CBS News

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