Should COVID Vaccine Be Required For CT Students? Take The Survey

CONNECTICUT — State employees, child care and school staff are required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in Connecticut. Should school children be next on the list?

Regardless of how you feel about compulsory vaccination, it hasn't really been logistically possible to impose the jab in schools. No federally approved coronavirus vaccine exists for children under the age of 12.

That's about to change. On Thursday, Groton-based drugmaker Pfizer asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to authorize emergency use of its vaccine, now marketed as Comirnaty, for children ages 5 to 11. In a news conference earlier this month, Connecticut Department of Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani said she anticipated emergency clearance from the FDA before Halloween.

The kids' dose is only about a third as strong as the adult version, yet the antibodies the children develop are just as effective as the ones manufactured in the bodies of teens and adults after a second dose. Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine was approved by the FDA for people 16 years of age and older in August.

If approved, the new age cohort would add another 28 million people in the United States to the vaccine eligibility pool.

As of Thursday, about 24 percent of the state's population remains unvaccinated, and that needle hasn't been moving much over the past few weeks. How much of an effect the addition of a new eligibility tier, one that has statistically proven to be the most naturally resilient to the virus, will have on the state's overall vaccination rate is unclear.

One child under 10-years-old, and four between the ages of 10-19, have died from coronavirus-associated illnesses since the start of the pandemic, according to DPH.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that once a vaccine is approved by the FDA for younger children, all public and private students will be required to be vaccinated to attend in-person classes.

What do you think? Should Connecticut follow a similar path? Take the Patch Survey below and let us know.