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Gavin NewsomJustin Sullivan / Staff / Getty

SACRAMENTO (LifeSiteNews) — California’s Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday his intentions to make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for in-person learning at public and private schools alike in the state, the first mandate of its kind.

The Daily Wire reports that the new mandate will take effect the semester following formal approval of the COVID-19 vaccines for younger age groups by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), starting with grades 7 through 12, and followed by kindergarten through grade 6, with “rare” exemptions for religious or medical reasons.

“We are all exhausted by this pandemic. We are all exhausted by this. And that is the purpose of this,” Newsom, who survived a grassroots recall effort last month, declared Friday. “We hope this encourages folks to get vaccinated … We have no trepidation, no hesitancy in encouraging local districts to move forward more expeditiously.”

In defense of the mandate, Newsom noted that “schools already require vaccines for measles, mumps and more.” But he left out the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine, and so come with a far more limited understanding of their safety, particularly for children.

Vaccine defenders note that the one-year development period was not starting from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1–3 years on their own — to just three months apiece. 

While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the US Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” 

May reporting from NBC News quotes several mainstream experts acknowledging “gaps” in federal vaccine monitoring, and a Project Veritas investigation released in September shows insiders at a federal medical facility speaking candidly about serious medical complications they’ve seen after COVID vaccination that are not being reported. 

Regarding COVID vaccine mandates for students, data shows that children are at little-to-no risk from the novel coronavirus, while even experts otherwise friendly to the COVID vaccines — as acknowledged in July by the left-leaning publication Wired — argue that the potential for vaccine-related myocarditis among males undermines the public health establishment’s persistent refrain that “the benefits of [COVID-19] vaccination far outweigh any harm.”

In July, a team of researchers with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine “analyze[d] approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020,” and found a “mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.” The lead researcher, Dr. Marty Makary, accused the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) of basing its advocacy of school COVID vaccination on “flimsy data.”

LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.