“Vaccinating students should be quick and easy,”: BC Teachers Federation President

(From the files of Brendan Pawliw MYPGNow staff)

The President of the BC Teachers Federation is scratching her head as to why no mass vaccination clinics will be offered in schools.

This comes as students between the ages of 12-17 can book their appointment for a first dose.

Teri Mooring told Vista Radio reducing barriers is essential to the province’s vaccination program.

“It just makes sense that they are set up (schools as vaccination sites) so that the health authorities can come in, do the vaccinations quickly and efficiently, and allow those barriers to be reduced.”

“Students getting vaccinated should be a quick and easy plan. We know where students are – they are in secondary schools and middle schools in our province and we ought to bring vaccines to them.”

Mooring also mentioned kids don’t have the luxury of having three paid hours off to get vaccinated as employees do – possibly putting a further strain on some families.

“Those families for their younger students don’t have those three hours for each child. What we are asking some families to do is to take time off work potentially to get their children vaccinated and we have families who are essential workers where it’s not that easy to take that time.”

“We have seen in many communities that the success of the vaccination clinics has been when the vaccines and the folks providing the vaccines actually go to the communities that need them. We have a lot of very large secondary schools across the province where we can vaccinate a thousand to fifteen hundred students quickly and efficiently.”

In order to get back to a sense of normalcy in BC, 75% of the population needs to be vaccinated making it even more critical that schools be considered as vaccination sites.

“We know that in a lot of communities in BC that have low vaccination rates it’s not necessarily because of vaccine hesitancy, it’s around all kinds of other issues including access. Making them easily accessible to students during their school days makes a lot of sense.”

For a link on how to register or took book an appointment, click here.