Gov. McMaster wants to prioritize SC seniors over teachers for COVID-19 vaccine
Teachers and school support staff will be next in line for the COVID-19 vaccine, but they won’t be jumping ahead of seniors, Gov. Henry McMaster said.
The governor said he strongly opposes a joint resolution introduced Wednesday that would designate school employees as “mission-critical workers” and vault them into Phase 1a of the state’s vaccination plan.
“It is clearly the older people who are at risk and we are not going to take a single vaccination from those who are likely to die from this virus to give to someone who is not likely to die from the virus,” the governor said Thursday at a joint press conference with state Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman. “It would be unethical and immoral to do that.”
Teachers and school support staff are currently included in Phase 1b of the state’s vaccine rollout, which is not expected to get underway until early spring.
State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman last month asked the governor and state Department of Health and Environmental Control that school employees be prioritized within Phase 1b to expedite the return of in-person instruction.
“While South Carolina’s state and local public health officials have noted the spread of COVID-19 is significantly less in schools than the surrounding community, it is crucial that our teachers and support staff have access to the vaccine at the onset of Phase 1b so that we can meet our shared goal of returning to full face to face instruction,” Spearman wrote in a Jan. 12 letter to McMaster and DHEC Acting Director Marshall Taylor.
“Not only will this return to more normalized instruction be beneficial for our students but also for those South Carolinians that have received or are set to receive the vaccine but cannot carry out their full range of responsibilities due to lack of child care resulting from their local school’s current virtual or hybrid mode of operation.”
As of Thursday, about half of South Carolina’s schools were offering only a virtual or hybrid education model, Department of Education spokesman Ryan Brown said.
Numerous state lawmakers in recent weeks have expressed support for prioritizing the vaccination of teachers and school support staff within Phase 1b.
Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey took his support a step further Wednesday, introducing a joint resolution to require that South Carolina teachers and support staff be moved to Phase 1a and receive immediate vaccine priority.
The resolution calls on DHEC to ensure that all teachers and staff have the opportunity to be fully vaccinated within 30 days of its passage and requires that all South Carolina school districts offer five-day, in-person classroom instruction no later than two weeks after all employees have had the chance to be vaccinated.
“We’re about to lose this academic year, we’re about to lose the school year,” Massey said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “If we wait another month, another six weeks before teachers are eligible to get their vaccines, and then we take another month after that, for the vaccines to happen, and schools to come back, we will have lost the school year.”
The Edgefield Republican said he knew prioritizing teachers in this way would necessarily delay vaccinations to seniors, who are among those at highest risk of dying from the coronavirus, but said he hoped South Carolina’s older residents would be willing to make the sacrifice for the sake of its youngest.
“I’m angered that you’re in the position that you’re in now,” Massey said to seniors. “But we have the opportunity here to get children back in school. This school year.”
Brown, the Education Department spokesman, said the state superintendent was very supportive of Massey’s resolution and had asked districts to submit both vaccination plans and plans for returning to five-day, face-to-face instruction.
State education officials recently surveyed districts to get a sense of how many employees would want a vaccine, if offered one, and found that about 58% of teachers and support staff, or approximately 71,000 total employees statewide would accept a vaccine.
With the state currently getting about 72,500 first doses of COVID-19 vaccine from the federal government each week, DHEC could theoretically set aside a week’s worth of first doses and vaccinate all interested school employees, Massey said.
“If you’ll give us another week, we can get teachers vaccinated, we can get school support staff vaccinated, we can get kids back in school in front of their teachers for two months and there will be long-term positive impacts of doing that,” he said. “But if we don’t do this, if we don’t do it now, we’re going to lose these kids and there will be long-term implications for doing that.”
McMaster: Teacher vaccine proposal a ‘bad idea’
Even as lawmaker support for prioritizing teacher vaccinations grows, McMaster on Wednesday announced that the state’s roughly 309,000 residents ages 65 to 69 would next week move from Phase 1c to Phase 1a, jumping over school employees in the process.
The governor said there was a “moral and ethical duty” to ensure those at highest risk of dying from COVID-19 were the first vaccinated.
With nearly 82% of coronavirus deaths in South Carolina affecting those age 65 and older, McMaster said it would be “unconscionable and irresponsible” to vaccinate a younger person ahead of a senior citizen.
He said Massey’s plan was a “bad idea” because it was “not based on the facts” that indicate COVID-19 transmission in schools is minimal and said it would massively disrupt the state’s vaccine distribution efforts, which have picked up considerably in recent weeks.
“Now is not the time to throw a monkey wrench into the system and put people who are in danger in even more danger,” McMaster said.
As of Thursday, nearly 460,000 of the 780,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses South Carolina has received had been administered to about 373,000 people.
This story was originally published February 4, 2021 at 12:37 PM.