Covid Vaccination Rates Lag for N.Y.C. Kids. Will Shots at School Help?

New York City officials began holding vaccine clinics at elementary schools this week in hopes of improving rates among children, as coronavirus cases start to head back up.

Andrew Melville’s daughter is in the fourth grade at P.S. 69 Journey Prep School in the Bronx, where 22 percent of students are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. While Mr. Melville has gotten vaccinated himself, he does not believe his daughter should do so because he has concerns about the effectiveness of the shots.

“I’m against it 100 percent for kids,” Mr. Melville, 32, said. “You still could catch Covid with it. I caught Covid twice, and I’m fully vaccinated and got the booster shot.”

Resistance among parents like Mr. Melville is one of the reasons that vaccination rates for New York City’s 1 million public school students significantly lag those for adults. Some health experts find the figures alarming, in part because the city recently lifted its school mask mandate, along with other pandemic restrictions. And coronavirus case rates have begun to rise again, driven largely by BA.2, a highly transmissible Omicron subvariant.

Cases increased 31 percent in New York City in the past two weeks as of Thursday, according to The New York Times’s tracker. Case counts at schools are on the rise too, with 227 reported on Wednesday compared with 206 one week ago. The increase in cases at schools in the seven-day period that ended on Tuesday marked the biggest weekly gain since the peak of the Omicron wave, according to an analysis from The City.

In an effort to reverse the trend and bolster inoculations among children ages 5 to 11, New York City officials began holding vaccine clinics this week at public elementary schools in every borough except Manhattan, which has the highest vaccination rate among students. The weeklong clinics will be held at a new set of 20 schools each week, chosen based on their size and their vaccination rates, according to a spokesman for the New York City Education Department.

A total of 75 students were vaccinated at the clinics on Monday and Tuesday, the spokesman said. The clinics will return to the schools in several weeks to administer second doses.

The city mounted a broader effort at all elementary schools over the course of five weeks last fall, and nearly 60,000 students and staff members were vaccinated during that push. After the five weeks were up, in mid-December, around 27 percent of all vaccinated students in the 5-to-11 age group had received their shots at school.

The hope is that the clinics this time around will reach students whose parents have, until now, been hesitant or resistant, said Dr. Wayne J. Riley, the president of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University and a co-chairman of Mayor Eric Adams’s health-equity task force.

“I think now, parents can clearly see that the vaccines work to forestall the worst effects of Covid,” Dr. Riley said, adding that it was important to continue getting information about the vaccines out to families.

While the clinics will help certain parents by making vaccines easier to access, they may not be enough to convince others, who have not been persuaded about the safety and efficacy of the shots and who in some cases have absorbed misinformation about them. One surefire way to improve vaccination rates would be to mandate the shots, some experts said.

“I think clinics will help, it helps remove the logistical barriers, but they only get the vaccination rates so far,” said Dr. Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

“I would imagine that to get the vaccination coverage up there for kids, vaccine requirements would be the way to do it,” he added.

While more than 87 percent of adults and 79 percent of children ages 13 to 17 in New York City are fully vaccinated, according to city data, the same is true for just about 45 percent of those ages 5 to 12. (The national vaccination rate for children ages 5 to 12 is even lower, at 27 percent, according to The New York Times’s database.)

White children ages 5 to 17 have the lowest vaccination rate in the city: Forty percent are fully vaccinated, compared to 43 percent of Black children, 54 percent of Latino children and 99 percent of Asian children, according to city data.

The city has required teachers and school staff to be vaccinated, but there is no such requirement for students. Early this month the Supreme Court rejected the latest effort by New York City teachers to challenge the vaccine mandate.

The city’s new health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, said on Tuesday that he was weighing a vaccine mandate for public school students. He said that vaccination rates for 5- to 11-year-olds, the most recent age group to become eligible for the shots, were too low and that health and education officials were working to raise them.

“I think we’ve seen time and again, mandates are an important tool to getting vaccination levels up,” Dr. Vasan said at a news conference with the mayor at City Hall.

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The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was authorized late last year for emergency use in children 5 to 11. While recent data collected by health officials in New York State shows that it is less effective in preventing infections in those children than in older ones, it is still quite effective at preventing hospitalization.

No vaccine has yet been authorized for children under 5, though Pfizer plans to release results in April from a three-shot study for that age group. And Moderna said on Wednesday that it would seek emergency authorization for the use of its vaccine in children younger than 6.

Some students are attending schools where vaccination rates are quite low. At majority-Black schools, 35 percent of students are vaccinated, according to a Chalkbeat analysis conducted this month. At schools where most students are Latino, 44 percent are vaccinated, the analysis showed, compared with 51 percent at majority-white schools and 64 percent at majority-Asian schools.

Children are generally at a lower risk of a bad outcome if they get Covid-19, though some do get seriously ill from the virus. Those who get infected can also pass the virus on to others who are more vulnerable, Dr. Nash noted.

“All of these kids are connected to households and families and communities around the city,” Dr. Nash said. “It is important, in my view, to increase vaccination among kids to protect them but also to limit the spread.”

Children remain unvaccinated for a number of reasons. Some parents say they simply haven’t had the time to get their children vaccinated. Others don’t trust the safety of the shots. And some children have legitimate medical reasons for avoiding the vaccines.

Tyasia Baptistte’s son is in the third grade at P.S. 40 George W. Carver Elementary School in Brooklyn, where just 19.2 percent of students are fully vaccinated, according to city data. Ms. Baptistte, 23, is vaccinated, but she said she wanted more information before her son gets the vaccine.

“The doctors have been telling me to hold on because he was sick,” Ms. Baptistte said, adding that her son had a lung problem. “My mom works in a hospital, so I’m not close-minded. I just want to make sure that we’re making the right decision for our little babies.”

Chasity Arias’s children are in the fourth and fifth grade at P.S. 96 Richard Rodgers Elementary School in the Bronx, where 20.6 percent of students are fully vaccinated, according to city data. Ms. Arias, 31, is not vaccinated, and does not plan to get her children vaccinated either.

“First I will have to see if I think it’s safe for me, and then once I receive it, and I feel that it’s safe for me, then maybe I’ll think about getting it for my kids,” Ms. Arias said.

The coronavirus vaccines are safe, and few adverse effects have been reported. The vaccines have also been effective at preventing hospitalization and death from Covid-19.

But many families, who may not be tracking the latest research from the medical community, still have questions about how exactly the shots work. And many communities have been inundated with misinformation and disinformation about the vaccines.

“No parent ever wants to feel like they’re doing something to harm their child,” said Dr. Toni Eyssallenne, an internist and pediatrician for Strong Children’s Wellness, a Queens-based medical group.

“We have to do a better job of trying to stave the misinformation and making sure that we’re making it easy access, that we’re having patient conversations with our parents, to make sure that everybody feels secure and safe,” she said.

The concerns expressed by Cynthia Nieves, an unvaccinated mother of two, illustrate why vaccine hesitancy is a lingering problem.

One of her children attends P.S. 96 and is eligible to get vaccinated, but Ms. Nieves said no amount of information at a pop-up clinic would convince her.

“It’s just something I still don’t believe in yet,” she said. “I don’t want to give them something and later on, years down the line, something happens to my kids, because then I would feel like it’s my fault.”

Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.