Could COVID shot be required for SC school attendance? DHEC sets record straight

South Carolina health officials have no plans to add the COVID-19 vaccine to the list of required immunizations for childcare or school entry, but continue to recommend the shot for the vast majority of people.

The state Department of Health and Environmental Control clarified its position on a COVID-19 shot requirement in response to a statement Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson released Oct. 21 opposing the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 vaccination recommendations for children.

Wilson and 11 other Republican state attorneys general last month sent a letter to the CDC questioning an immunization advisory committee’s recommendation that the COVID-19 shot be added to the agency’s recommended immunization schedule for children.

While not a mandate — the federal government does not have the authority to mandate childhood vaccines — adding the shot to a list of recommended vaccines, they wrote, was troubling because states often rely on the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule to inform their own policies.

“This action could deny many parents the freedom to determine whether to subject their kids to an experimental vaccine,” the attorneys general wrote. “(The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices), the Centers for Disease Control, and the medical community need to stop forcing unproven policies and medicines on children who are not at risk of bodily harm.”

The letter goes on to cast doubt on the vaccine’s effectiveness and claims that requiring it could put more kids at risk than it protects by causing them medical and social problems.

“Given the lack of need for kids to obtain the vaccines and their lack of effectiveness, adding the COVID-19 vaccine to the list of childhood immunizations amounts to little more than a payout to big pharmaceutical companies at the expense of kids and parents,” the attorneys general wrote.

Ron Aiken, DHEC’s spokesman, said Wilson’s office had not given state health officials advance notice of his statement, which contradicts the health agency’s own COVID-19 guidance, and reiterated that DHEC continues to recommend residents roll up their sleeves.

“DHEC’s experts continue to review the growing evidence and research about COVID-19 vaccines, and our recommendations have not changed,” he said. “The vaccine is safe and effective for the vast majority of people, including children 6 months and older. The vaccine reduces the risk of serious illness due to COVID-19 and saves lives, including in children.”

That said, South Carolina does not currently require all of the immunizations recommended by the CDC, such as flu shots, and does not plan to add COVID-19 vaccination to the list of required childhood immunizations, Aiken said.

In fact, state health officials couldn’t require COVID-19 vaccinations for children even if they wanted to due to a law the General Assembly passed earlier this year that prohibits state and local government entities from imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

The new law, which passed largely along party lines and was enacted in April, explicitly outlaws COVID-19 vaccine requirements for South Carolina schoolchildren as a condition of attendance.

That didn’t stop Gov. Henry McMaster from weighing in on the matter, however, after false claims about a supposed federal COVID-19 vaccine requirement for children went viral last month.

“There’s some confusion on the CDC COVID-19 vaccine recommendations,” McMaster tweeted Oct. 21, the same day Wilson released his statement. “Let me clarify. As long as I am governor, I will never let the federal government — or anyone else — force the COVID-19 vaccine on South Carolina school children.”

Over the past year, McMaster and Wilson have fought multiple federal COVID-19 vaccine requirements in court, challenging the Biden administration’s mandates for health care workers, federal contractors and private employers with 100 or more employees.

The governor also wrote the U.S. secretary of defense in February to inform him that South Carolina would not punish National Guardsmen who decline COVID-19 vaccinations in violation of the federal requirement for all service members.

Courts struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal contractors and large private employers, but the requirements for health workers and members of the military remain in effect.

COVID vaccine safety and effectiveness

Despite the Wilson letter’s claims to the contrary, medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, widely consider the COVID-19 vaccine to be safe and effective for children and recommend vaccination for all children 6 months and older who do not have contraindications.

Severe reactions to the vaccine have occurred in children, but are extremely rare. One CDC study of children ages 5 through 11 confirmed 20 post-vaccination cases of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, and one death out of approximately 18.1 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine.

While deaths of children from COVID-19 infection also are rare, the risks of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 outweigh the risks of the vaccine, most medical experts agree.

More than 1,800 children nationwide have died from COVID-19 complications since the start of the pandemic, according to the CDC, including 28 in South Carolina.

COVID-19 vaccines that were developed using the original virus strain are less adept at preventing infection against the variants that now predominate, but are not ineffective, as the Republican attorneys general letter asserts. Studies show the vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe disease and a rare but serious complication known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C.

The American medical community’s support for vaccinating children against COVID-19 notwithstanding, vaccine uptake among children has been middling, at best.

Nationally, only about 42% of children ages 6 months to 17 years have gotten at least one vaccine dose, according to a recent analysis by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

In South Carolina, just 27% of children have gotten a first dose and 23% have completed COVID-19 vaccinations, according to DHEC data. By comparison, nearly 71% of adults in South Carolina have gotten at least one vaccine dose and about 62% are fully vaccinated.

Staying on top of children’s COVID-19 and flu vaccinations is especially important right now, health officials said, because South Carolina hospitals are dealing with a surge in babies with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.

Health officials earlier this week reported the state’s first pediatric flu-related death of the season, a child from the Midlands, and cautioned that widespread flu activity indicated a potentially severe flu season ahead. As of last week, 29 children in South Carolina had been hospitalized with flu-associated illnesses since Oct. 1, the start of the season, according to DHEC data. By comparison, no children were hospitalized with flu last year and just one was hospitalized the season prior.

If children continue to end up in the hospital with COVID-19 or flu because they weren’t inoculated against those diseases, it stresses an already burdened system.

“Keeping kids healthy by making sure they are current on all of their shots for vaccine-preventable diseases is paramount,” DHEC spokeswoman Laura Renwick said.