Secondary schools with vaccination rates below 80 per cent will be brought up to threshold, Prime Minister says

Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education officials will be putting mechanisms in place to ensure that secondary schools which have not yet achieved vaccination of 80 percent of the student body will meet this threshold.

Prime Minister Gaston Browne says that most secondary schools have reached herd immunity, but some are lagging behind.  Accordingly, he says, something will be done to address this.

PM Browne says the Government, through its vaccination mandate, had been pushing to achieve herd immunity in schools so that students could return to face-to-face learning soonest.

He says the online-learning platform is an impediment for students to perform at their optimum.

Meanwhile, Franz deFreitas, the United Progressive Party Candidate for St. John’s City South, agrees that the Government’s online learning platform was not producing the required results.

The Cabinet, last Wednesday, November 17, rescinded an earlier mandate, which prevented unvaccinated children from going onto the school plant. 

And Browne says his Administration hopes that all students will return to the classroom  at the beginning of next year, once the public-health situation gets better.