When it comes to vaccine mandates, public discussions can quickly turn to heated arguments, leaving no hope of finding common ground. But an online petition to rescind a vaccine mandate for teachers, followed by a rebuttal from a parent, provided an exchange that strangely made common ground seem possible.
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The petition was posted on the website Change.org two weeks ago by Freedom2Choose, a group that says it includes “a substantial number” of Montgomery County Public Schools teachers and staff who oppose the mandate. Nearly 500 people had signed the petition as of Tuesday afternoon.
It listed six reasons for calling the county’s teacher vaccine mandate unjustified. Among them:
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“We do not accept that COVID-19 is a severe universal threat.”
“We are concerned about harmful side-effects of the vaccines.”
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“We believe that there are effective mitigation strategies that do not require vaccine mandates.”
Adam Zimmerman, who lives in Rockville and has two children in the county schools, saw the petition and began crafting a point-by-point response. He was among the first parents to push for a teacher vaccine mandate so that schools would be able to safely reopen this fall.
He began his rebuttal by venting some steam, as the gratefully inoculated often do after hearing from the anti-vaccine crowd. His widely distributed email said the petition was “riddled with lies, misstatements, and deliberate distortions of science and health.” In a subsequent telephone interview, he told me that he’d been upset “seeing a petition like this come from educators, who are in charge of teaching our children.”
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Had he said that at, say, a school board meeting, there might have been quite a fuss, which has become the norm at many school board meetings across the nation. But after calming down, he began to address the petition by marshaling the cold facts.
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It was true that the coronavirus had hit some groups harder than others — the elderly with comorbidities were most likely to die after being infected; healthy 20- and 30-somethings had some of the highest infection rates but among the lowest death rates.
But not accepting the virus as a severe universal threat, that was a mischaracterization. And for parents like him who have children too young to be vaccinated, it is not a threat he takes lightly.
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Zimmerman noted that 42 million people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus, and nearly 700,000 people have died of covid-19.
“Per the American Academy of Pediatrics [aap.org], this includes more than 5.5 million cases among children.” he wrote.
He then went on to cite a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report showing that hospitalization rates among children increased nearly fivefold between June and August this year.
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MCPS, with more than 160,000 students, is the largest school district in Maryland. Slightly more than 70 percent of the school system’s 24,000 employees were vaccinated as of June, according to a school spokesperson.
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Regarding the petitioner’s concern about side effects, Zimmerman cited a conclusion reached by the CDC: “Serious side effects that could cause a long-term health problem are extremely unlikely following any vaccination, including Covid-19 vaccines.”
And as for using other covid mitigation strategies, he again drew on the CDC, which agreed that there were other mitigation and prevention strategies. However, “Vaccination is the leading public health prevention strategy to end the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The Freedom2Choose group also argued that the First Amendment gives its members the right to refuse the vaccine based on religious beliefs. Zimmerman cited a variety of faith leaders who have encouraged parishioners to be vaccinated but haven’t issued policy statements on exemptions.
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“The bottom line is that we have a Constitutional right, as adult citizens of the United States, to make our own medical decisions, and we will not freely surrender that right,” the petition argued.
Zimmerman has tried to teach his children, ages 6 and 9, how connected the world is. “I tell my children that, sometimes, what affects our health is not so much the decisions we make but the decisions that people around us make,” he said in the telephone interview. “When my children get their back-to-school vaccinations and wear their covid masks to school, it’s not just to protect themselves. It’s to protect their friends, their classmates and their teachers.”
The debate in Montgomery County may not have the same urgency as in other parts of the country. The jurisdiction has a robust vaccination participation rate, one of the highest in the nation, closing in on 90 percent among all eligible residents. The benefits are seen in steadily declining covid infection and death rates, in available hospital beds and medical resources and in people beginning to return to a state of normality.
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In states where vaccinations rates remain around 30 percent, health care systems are being overwhelmed. A flood of covid patients are making it all but impossible for some hospitals to serve others. Fewer surgeries. Less emergency care.
But the youngest residents in the region have not escaped this virus. More than 92,000 children in Maryland under the age of 19 have contracted the virus and 11 have died. More than 150,000 children in Virginia under 19 came down with the virus and 11 died there, too. And in the District, more than 10,000 children under 19 have tested positive and none have died, so far.
So where does that leave us?
Zimmerman firmly believed, as did the CDC, that vaccinated teachers and staff would make the school a better place for students to learn, a safer place to play.
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In their petition, the teachers wrote, “We love our jobs and the children we work so hard to teach.” Since the start of the pandemic, they had given the welfare of their students “more hours than we can count.” And they have done so, they said, “willingly and eagerly.”
The students. The children. That was common ground, rich and fertile on both sides. Well within sight if not quite within reach.
To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy
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