DC School Mandate

The kids of Washington, D.C. need you to take action! On Thursday, May 4, the D.C. Council will hold a public roundtable on ending the COVID-19 public health emergency. We believe they will discuss the compliance deadline for the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for students, which has been pushed back until the start of the 2023-2024 school year.

They need to completely abandon their COVID-19 vaccine mandate for school. COVID-19 shots are not only unnecessary for children, but are dangerous and can cause serious injuries and death. It is time to end this mandate once and for all and give parents the ability to decide whether or not to give these shots to their children without coercion.

The Council passed legislation in October 2021 that required COVID-19 vaccinations for all students age 12 and older within 70 days of the shots receiving full authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to remain in school.

In an effort to avoid a mass exodus from the public school system due to poor COVID-19 vaccine uptake, D.C. Deputy Mayor of Education Paul Kihn sent a letter in August notifying public school leaders that the enforcement deadline for students ages 12 – 17 had been pushed back to Jan. 3, 2023.

Children are already suffering academically as a result of lockdowns and other COVID-19 measures. This mandate stands to force parents and children to choose between taking a dangerous product which they have avoided thus far, or go further into a downward academic spiral.

D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson introduced the COVID-19 vaccine mandate bill last year. In a curious turn of events, she was the one who proposed this legislation to delay the mandate until the 2023 – 2024 school year and has further stated that she supports revisiting the requirement to determine whether a mandate should exist at all based on the evolving science. Following the vote, Chairman of the D.C. Council, Phil Mendelson also alluded to the possibility of repealing the mandate altogether.

“This looked like something that would be picked up across the country,” he said, referring to when the council approved the mandate in late 2021. “We seemed to be in step and following the science. A year later, and where is the science? The CDC website does not say a mandate is what they recommend. The pandemic is evolving into more of an endemic.”

Let’s build on this momentum. Thanks to your outreach last fall, the majority of D.C. Council members voted the right way to put off the mandate. Continue to contact the D.C. Council members and urge them to end the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for D.C. children. Let’s flood their inboxes and voicemail boxes with the truth about these horrendous shots! It’s time they admit just how unfounded and dangerous COVID-19 vaccine mandates are.