Shots for kids: New York should add the COVID vaccine to school enrollment requirements

A CDC panel has added the COVID vaccine to the list of shots it recommends children get. New York State should follow through by adding the vaccine to the battery of shots children are required to get before entering school.

The state’s immunization schedule has long required kids in public, private and religious schools to have had their shots against diphtheria and tetanus; polio; measles, mumps and rubella; hepatitis B; chickenpox; and more. That’s the best way to prevent nasty diseases, most of which have been essentially eradicated over decades thanks to vaccination, from returning with a vengeance. (The state allows for medical exemptions but, since 2019, no religious exemptions.)

COVID-19, which still kills nearly 400 Americans a day, is most threatening by far to older people and those with underlying health conditions; serious cases are very rare among children. But given incredibly high infection totals, thousands of kids still wind up hospitalized — and about 1,500 have died since the start of the pandemic. Measles, mumps, chickenpox and other viruses for which we now accept vaccines as a routine preventive strategy never killed nearly as many.

If nearly every kid got a first set of COVID shots before entering school, class disruptions would be minimized. Hospitalizations would be prevented. Lives would be saved. While it’s true that immunization won’t stop the virus from spreading, the end goal here should be preventing serious illness and death.

What’s unclear is how much enduring protective value a round of pre-enrollment shots will have down the road. COVID is mutating now like the flu does, and, though influenza kills children, schools don’t require the flu shot each year. That’s presumably because of the heavy logistical lift it would entail to make kids get a shot that’s reformulated annually.

Should every schoolkid have to get an annual flu shot? It’s a conversation worth having — but a far tougher call than whether an initial round of COVID shots, a proven life-saver, should be on New York’s immunization list. That answer is yes.