With the one-dose COVID-19 vaccination rate for five- to 11-year-olds hovering around 48 per cent in the Island Health region, a teachers’ representative is calling for immunization clinics in schools.
Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association president Winona Waldron said clinics could be held at all schools, which were back in full operation Monday after the holiday break, which included an extra week of preparations for preventing the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant.
“Why not? And have teachers prioritized for boosters and allow everybody to be getting vaccinated at their place of work or their school.”
The average one-dose vaccination rate for five- to 11-year-olds in B.C. is 40 per cent. Vaccinations for members of that age group began after Health Canada approved a smaller dose of the Pfizer vaccine for them in November. B.C. government surveys found that 58 per cent of parents planned to register their children for vaccination immediately, 18 per cent said they would wait and about 25 per cent said they were undecided about going ahead with the vaccine.
Vaccines for five- to 11-year-olds are not given at pharmacies but at clinics specifically for children in that age group and their caregivers, or at all-ages clinics.
COVID-19 clinics at schools would “streamline” the entire vaccination process, Waldron said.
She noted that school vaccination clinics are already held to immunize kids against other illnesses, such as measles, mumps and diphtheria. “I think it’s easy to do,” she said. “It’s just about making it available to the most people possible.”
Waldron said up to 97 per cent of the association’s approximately 2,000 teachers are vaccinated.
Saanich Teachers’ Association president Michael MacEwan said his group would favour COVID-19 clinics in schools if they made a difference in the effort to get the vaccine to more people.
Victoria Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils president Angela Cooper Carmichael also likes the idea of school clinics, and said they should be held after-hours.
“It’s really convenient for parents who work,” Cooper Carmichael said. “After hours in a school, there’s lots of space to set up a clinic like that.”
Interim superintendent Deb Whitten said the Greater Victoria School District has looked at the idea of school clinics for COVID-19 vaccination. “Obviously, we would support it if that helped,” she said.
Whitten said she’s been in contact with Island Health and has offered schools as vaccination sites, but the health authority had reservations about the idea for young children, and wanted to ensure any school-based clinic would be “kid-friendly” and parents would be able to be present. “I think they were pretty cautious to move into a larger setting.”
Cooper Carmichael, who has an eight-year-old elementary-school student with one dose of vaccine and a 13-year-old middle-school student with two, said she has heard from parents worried about how quickly the Omicron variant is spreading, and much of that concern is for teachers. “Do they have immunocompromised family members? Do they have children not old enough to be vaccinated yet? We’re sending them essentially to the front lines. At this point, less than 50 per cent of elementary school children are vaccinated.”
She said her organization is considering using money from its budget, and perhaps from individual parent advisory councils, to purchase medical-grade masks for distribution.
Whitten said while the vaccination rate might be about 50 per cent for younger kids, it’s considerably higher for 12- to 17-year-olds — 85 per cent have had two doses in the Island Health region, while the provincial average is 83 per cent.
jbell@timescolonist.com
