Back-To-School Vaccines: What NJ Requires For COVID, Other Diseases

NEW JERSEY — Public school systems in New Jersey won’t require students heading back to school this month to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Last year, as the omicron variant surged following holiday travel and gatherings, mandatory vaccinations were floated in several states and school districts to control the spread of the virus that, nationwide, has killed 1.03 million people since the pandemic began in 2020, including over 34,000 in New Jersey.

The only place in the country where students will be required to get vaccinated against the coronavirus as a condition of enrollment this fall is the District of Columbia. The requirement applies to “all students who are of an age for which there is a COVID-19 vaccination fully approved by the FDA.”

California considered similar requirements but backed away from a COVID-19 vaccine mandate last spring.

Legislatures in 20 states ban local school districts from requiring students to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

They are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy recently signed an executive order lifining COVID-19 testing requirement for unvaccinated school employees, child care staff and state contractors. This comes after the CDC recently scaled back COVID guidelines, and changed social distancing and quarantine protocols.

Although students are not required to get vaccinated against COVID-19, the state will still require school districts and child care facilities to report vaccination and testing data to allow the New Jersey Department of Health to "continue to monitor COVID-19 and make data-driven decisions to keep residents safe."

"With children as young as 6 months old now eligible for vaccines and millions of New Jerseyans vaccinated and boosted, more of our residents are safe from severe illness due to COVID-19," Murphy said in a statement.

Only about 30 percent of U.S. children ages 5-11 are fully vaccinated, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. About 60 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds are fully vaccinated.

Overall, about 223 million people — or about 67 percent of the eligible U.S. population — have been fully vaccinated nationwide, including 107.5 million people who have gotten their booster shots, according to the CDC. In New Jersey, 77 percent of the population is fully vaccinated and 92 percent have received at least one dose.

Will Students Mask?

The CDC relaxed its mask guidance in February, telling K-12 schools they could tie their local policies to the community rates of COVID-19 illnesses and hospital capacity, rather than the total number of COVID-19 cases.

Accordingly, schools are easing protocols to slow COVID-19 transmission, even as the BA.5 variant — the most contagious to date — quickly spreads across the country.

For example, only seven of the nation’s largest 500 school districts planned to require students and staff wear masks, according to the tracking company Burbio. That compares with 369 large school districts requiring masks in October 2021.

In March, Murphy announced the state was lifting mask mandates for schools, but districts were free to continue mask requirements when cases were high.

However, federal health officials recently recommend face coverings in areas with "high" community COVID levels. More: Back To School Masking? Here Is The Latest CDC Recommendation For NJ

In part, the decline in mask requirements in big school districts is due to political pressure. In Georgia for example, Clayton County Public Schools can’t require students to wear masks because of a state ban, but it does require adults and visitors to wear face coverings.

“The goal is to be in person, face-to-face, as close to normal as possible,” Morcease Beasley, the district’s superintendent, told EducationWeek, an independent news organization that covers education and school issues. “Staff are being very supportive, visitors are being very supportive, and many students, while it’s not required of them, are wearing them as well.”

Pre-COVID Anti-Vax Tide

A tide of vaccine skepticism was sweeping the country before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, threatening to wipe out progress to eliminate measles, mumps and other childhood diseases decades after they were all but eradicated in the United States.

The bitterly polarizing issue pits public health officials and others in the medical profession — and a growing number of state lawmakers — against so-called “anti-vaxxers,” who often cite religious freedom, personal objections and government overreach in their decisions to delay vaccinations or not immunize their children at all.

Much of the current opposition to vaccines can be traced to a 1988 article published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet in which former British doctor Andrew Wakefield falsely linked the MMR vaccine to autism.

His co-authors and the journal all redacted it, and Wakefield lost his medical license over his claims. Though the claim has been debunked over and over, it still pops up on social media as fact, worsening fears of vaccine safety.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have laws on the books requiring that students be vaccinated against early childhood diseases, but most of them — 44, as of May — allow religious exemptions as well.

Additionally, 15 allow for philosophical exemptions for children whose parents object to immunizations because of personal, moral or other beliefs. Many states align their vaccine requirements with recommendations from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

State laws vary greatly in what they require. All states but Alabama require students to be vaccinated against hepatitis B. About a half dozen states or locations — Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York City, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island — require students to get an annual flu shot.

In general, kindergarteners ages 4-6 must be vaccinated against chickenpox; diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP vaccine); measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccine); and polio. By middle and high school, students should be vaccinated against meningococcal disease, human papillomavirus (HPV vaccine) and Serogroup B meningococcal infection.

For K-12 NJ requires DTaP, polio, MMR, Varicella, Hepatitis B, and Meningococcal according to Britannica’s ProCon.org. You can find the list of immunization requirements here.

Exemptions are allowed in the Garden State for valid medical and religious exemptions (reasons for not showing proof of immunizations) as per the NJ Immunization of Pupils in School regulations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Have a correction or news tip? Email sarah.salvadore@patch.com