A 54-year-old public-school science teacher on Long Island was arrested on New Year’s Eve after being accused of giving a teenager an injection of what appeared to be Covid-19 vaccine without his parents’ consent, the Nassau County police said.
Police said that Laura Parker Russo, a teacher, gave a shot of what appeared like a coronavirus vaccination to a 17-year-old boy at her Sea Cliff, N.Y. home. The youth returned home later to inform his mother. She called the police and denied that she had authorized the vaccination.
According to police, Ms. Russo was arrested for the illegal practice of a profession. In a statement, school officials stated that Ms. Russo was removed from her New Hyde Park classroom in the Herricks Public Schools system and reassigned in the meantime of the investigation. A school website that stated Ms. Russo taught at Herricks High School has been taken down.
The New York Times sent an email to Ms. Russo, but she did not respond immediately. According to police, she was released from her arrest and will appear in criminal court on January 21st. The state education law makes unauthorized practice of a profession a felony and can result in a maximum of four years imprisonment.
New York is one of the states that requires parental consent to allow minors to get Covid vaccinations. For a variety reasons, some parents have stopped their children from being vaccinated, including concerns about safety and side effects.
Scientists have confirmed that vaccines are safe for children aged 5 and over. They recommend that they be vaccinated as children could spread the virus to others or become seriously ill. An increase in pediatric hospitalizations has been caused by the highly contagious Omicron virus.
And because broad immunity cannot exist if minors are not vaccinated, federal officials and state officials hope that more parents will get their children vaccinated, especially as students return from school.
Daily reports of new coronavirus cases have quadrupled in Nassau County over the past two weeks, according to The New York Times’s tracker. Hospitalizations have increased by 47 percent in the county since then.
Seventy-six percent of Nassau County residents are vaccinated, according to The Times’s tracker, and the rate for 12- to 17-year-olds is only slightly lower, at 72 percent, according to state data.
New York has no Covid vaccine mandate. Some private schools, however, require vaccination. New York City also requires vaccination for certain extracurricular and sports activities.
Los Angeles became the first school district in September to require vaccines for children 12 years and older. However, those plans were delayed. The Washington, D.C. Council has voted that vaccines should be mandated for students 16 years of age and older beginning March 1.
“This is a major source of tension between what is important for public health and what is important in terms of individual liberties and parental autonomy,” said Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.
Schools require other vaccines in order to enroll, such as measles vaccination.
“That’s the big question: Does Covid-19 fall into the same category as some of these other vaccine preventable diseases that we do require for school entry, or does it not?” Dr. Nash said.
James C. McKinley Jr. reported.
Source: NY Times
