Vice President Kamala Harris sidestepped questions on whether teachers should be vaccinated against the coronavirus before returning to the classroom, seeming to side with many teachers unions and buck President Biden’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance.
“Teachers should be a priority,” Harris told NBC’s Today Show on Wednesday.
In a slate of recommendations released last week, the CDC stated that teachers didn’t have to be inoculated against COVID-19 as part of creating safe classrooms for them and their students, particularly if other precautions, such as social distancing and proper ventilation, were taken.
“We think that they should be a priority,” Harris repeated Wednesday. “And the states are making decisions individually about where they will be on the list of who gets vaccinated.”
On school reopenings, Harris was asked about confusion Biden caused during Tuesday’s town hall when he dismissed a definition provided by White House press secretary Jen Psaki from her briefing room podium as “a mistake in the communication.”
Psaki last week outlined how the administration is working toward having more than 50% of K-8 schools teaching in-person one day a week.
Harris was adamant that the administration’s target was to reinstate in-person instruction at “as many K-8 schools as possible … five days a week” within their first 100 days in office.
Harris was also pressed on CDC guidelines that tied school reopenings to COVID-19 infection rates in school districts. Anchor Savannah Guthrie pointed out that if schools followed that guidance, 90% of the country’s counties would have closed classrooms.
Harris dodged the question on whether it was a mistake to make that connection.
“What they have recommended are exactly that: recommendations,” she said.
About an hour later, the vice president’s top spokeswoman, Symone Sanders, was pressed on the seeming disconnect between the White House and CDC on teacher vaccinations. Asked to answer “yes” or “no” on whether it is the White House’s policy that teachers should be jabbed before returning to schools, Sanders dodged.
“The president and the vice president believe that teachers should be prioritized,” she said, adding when pressed again: “The president and the vice president believe that teachers should be prioritized for vaccinations.”
Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert and Biden’s chief medical adviser, on Wednesday also repeated the “prioritized” line about teachers. But he said inoculating every single U.S. teacher before schools can reopen would be “not workable.”
