AFT President Randi Weingarten will bring leadership together this week to consider a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for teachers, she told Chuck Todd during the Aug. 8 edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“Since 1850, we’ve dealt with vaccines in schools. It’s not a new thing to have immunization in schools,” Weingarten said. “We need to be working with our employers, not opposing them, on vaccine mandates.”
She added, “My members have stepped up: 90 percent of the teacher members have actually gotten the vaccine. But I do think that the circumstances have changed and that vaccination is a community responsibility, and it weighs really heavily on me that kids under 12 can’t get vaccinated.”
Asked by Todd whether there should be an elementary school teacher in America allowed to teach children in class who isn’t vaccinated, Weingarten cited “significant religious objections and exemptions and significant medical objections and exemptions. … But there’s ways of which you can do accommodations in all sorts of different ways, which is part of the reason you have to work together on these vaccine policies.”
Her segment with Todd begins at 23:24.