Argentina launches vax campaign to get kids back to in-person classes
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Loading... - Willow Morrison
- 25 Jan 2022
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Argentina on Monday launched a National Vaccination Campaign against Covid-19 to ensure “full and safe in-person presence in schools,” with an eye toward the start of the new school year in a few weeks and after two years during which the pandemic left thousands of children without in-person learning for months and spurred many to actually drop out of school.
“The priority is for this year for there to be school and in-person (learning) for all Argentinian children. Let them all return to school,” said Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez at the ceremony to inaugurate the vaccination campaign at a stadium in the town of Moron, in Buenos Aires province.
“And to do it, we need teachers and we have to give the teachers safe scenarios to be able to work and that security is only provided by vaccination,” the president added.
The campaign to get vaccination on the national calendar and increase immunization against the coronavirus is aimed at primary and secondary school students, their families, teachers and non-teacher staff with the objective of guaranteeing in-person learning during the school year.
Argentina’s school year, which will last for 190 days, will begin on March 2 in 22 of the country’s 24 jurisdictions, Education Minister Jaime Perczyk said, meaning that the country has five weeks to get kids and teens vaccinated.
Argentina last August began vaccinating teens against Covid-19 and in October health authorities began vaccinating children. According to the latest figures from the Health Ministry, 69.5 percent of children between 3 and 11 have gotten at least their first dose and 46.3 percent have completed the two-dose vaccine regimen, while 85.7 percent of teens between 12 and 17 have gotten at least one dose and 67.5 percent have gotten both doses.
Meanwhile, 90 percent of the country’s teachers have been fully vaccinated.
As part of the confinement measures that Argentina implemented to combat the pandemic in 2020 and part of 2021, the Fernandez administration shut down in-person classes and inaugurated online learning, a move that administration officials admitted delinked about one million children from school, although now about half that number have reconnected.
“We’ve recovered a large number of kids but we’re missing others,” Perczyk said. Read More…
