American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the teacher’s union needs to be working with employers on COVID-19 vaccine mandates for teachers.
Anchor Chuck Todd said, “You’d like to see a vaccine mandate is my understanding. What does that mean for the teachers union?”
Weingarten said, “The Delta variants are alarming, and the spread is alarming. You’ve already said it’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated. I’m not going to repeat what you or Dr. Fauci said. Let me just be personal for a moment which is that vaccines are the single most important way of dealing with COVID. We’ve always dealt with — or since 1850, we’ve dealt with vaccines in schools. It’s not a new thing to have immunizations in schools. I think that on a personal matter, as a matter of personal conscience, I think we need to be working with our employers, not opposing them, on vaccine mandates and all their vaccine policies. I said last week that I wanted to bring my leadership together, and we are this week, to revisit and to reconsider our policy that passed in October about voluntary —that the best way to do this was to do it volitionally. Let me say my members have stepped up. 90% 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.”
She added, “This is a public health crisis, and the politics are infecting it. I felt the need to bring people together and to stand up and say this as a matter of personal conscience.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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