Fellow Missouri teachers: It’s your fault if you refuse the vaccine and lose your job
My dear former colleagues:
In the newspaper, and on the evening news, I have seen stories about COVID-19 and you. Kansas City Public Schools requires all employees to be vaccinated or tested for the coronavirus once a week. The St. Louis Public Schools now demand 100% vaccination of all teachers. By the time you read this, a lot of you anti-vaxxers will be out of work.
Before I retired recently, I was one of you, a Missouri classroom teacher. I love and admire many of you. I feel gratitude to so many of you. And I know many who are unvaccinated. That last point pains me.
Some have gotten this letter from the school board: “Your employment with the St. Louis Public Schools will be terminated effective Oct. 16, 2021, for violation of board policy. Thank you for your service. We wish you well in your future endeavors.” The school board voted unanimously in favor of this mandate. Our teacher’s union fully backed it. I agree. You should be fired.
Teaching is a profession in which a master’s degree, attained at some point during a career, is a common expectation. My point being that you are educated. You understand expertise. Ignorance is not an excuse. Furthermore, you have already had vaccinations. Teachers get shots for measles, mumps, whooping cough, tuberculosis. You would be unemployable if you didn’t get immunizations. Most of us get an annual flu shot. In short, you have enough education to understand the expertise of medical professionals, and you have plenty of experience with vaccinations.
You have had months to do research. Information from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute Of Allergy And Infectious Diseases, the World Health Organization — all of this is readily available. Then there’s your family physician. If what you rely on now is QAnon, Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Infowars, or your bartender who recommends a medication primarily used as an animal dewormer, you have no excuse because you’re educated.
If you are unvaccinated, you are now in the group at highest risk. “About 80% of hospitalized patients have not been vaccinated. So 4 out of 5. The number is a little bit higher in the intensive care units. There’s no question that vaccination is the most important, and most potent, thing we can do to prevent people from being hospitalized,” said Dr. Clay Dunagan of Washington University in St. Louis, the alma mater of not just a few of us.
I suppose it would be one thing if you risk only yourself. But you risk your classes, schools, colleagues, friends, family, loved ones and anyone who comes in contact with you. I am thinking of the famous aphorism: “Live or die, but don’t poison everything.”
You say there is a teacher shortage in Missouri, and this mandate will make it worse. So whose fault is that? All you ever had to do was get a shot or two. Medicine is always a narcissistic wound. Put it this way: It’s just pride. There’s no shortage of that. What did the Romans say? ”Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas” — “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
It’s too late to save your job, but not too late to save your life. You can get another job. You can’t get another life.
I can’t begin to tell you how much this pains me. I love you folks. But I agree with the mandate. At least two teachers in the St. Louis district have already died of COVID-19. A school athletic trainer and a school board member in the Kansas City area lost their lives to it. and If you are unvaccinated, you should not be allowed in a classroom. Being forced to comply or lose you job, I think you must feel terrible. Perhaps there’s some comfort in this: Nobody is saying you’re incompetent. They’re just saying you’re unvaccinated.
One friend of mine has died of COVID-19, and another almost died. I don’t want to add to that list.
Get the shot. Then get another teaching gig. The next time I see you, I want it to be at your retirement party, not at your funeral service.