Every student in the state of Iowa must have an updated Certificate of Immunizations every year to attend school. At CCA, in 7th grade, you are required to get the Tdap vaccine, which protects you from tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough, all of which are serious and can be deadly. Students are also required to get the Meningococcal vaccine, which protects people from a deadly bacteria, meningococcus. Coronavirus is as deadly as any of the other examples, why wouldn’t our school mandate vaccines for the students? Especially knowing that there are many constant spikes of Coronavirus cases. 

In Iowa, there are only 59% of people fully vaccinated. It barely meets the majority. Most of Clear Creek Amana’s buildings and facilities are in Johnson county. Johnson county currently has the highest record of fully vaccinated people in Iowa, 72.48% of the population is fully vaccinated, a total of 106,549. Although the CCA district is built up of two different counties, Johnson and Iowa county, Iowa county has 61% of people vaccinated, a total of 9,905 people. 

These numbers don’t totally give an accurate picture of how many people are vaccinated at Clear Creek Amana; vaccination rates for 12-17-year-olds are just over 50% in America, and only 15.6% vaccinated for 5-11-year-olds in Iowa.  Children are more prone to getting the virus and having more severe cases. 

On January 12, Johnson county had 2548 new reported Covid cases, Iowa county had 214 newly reported cases. The cases are constantly going up with the rise of omicron cases and other foreign variants. Knowing that Covid is more severe in children, it is crucial that children start to get vaccinated, especially in CCA schools. CCA doesn’t mandate any covid vaccines or masks in students or staff. Masks are encouraged, but looking around the clear creek high school, less than half of the school wears a mask consistently. 

Unfortunately, people have become difficult and try to come up with different excuses to not get vaccinated. The hearsay that ends up on social media is unbearable sometimes, there are illogical excuses. It feels like CCA is avoiding the mandate to stay away from the controversy of the community, avoiding the topic as a whole allows less controversy to arise. 

There should be no debate on whether students and staff should have to get vaccinated to attend school, there is one scientific, logical answer. Which is mandating vaccines and protecting the community.