Timely decision for safe school year

The Government did well when it decided to give priority to vaccinating teachers and employees at all universities and schools ahead of the new academic year 2021-2022 scheduled on October 9.

In a recent meeting of the Supreme Committee for Management of Coronavirus Crisis, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli revealed the government’s plan to vaccinate university students, academic staff members, employees and workers to ensure safe academic year. The Premier also noted that the vaccination plan would also cover the pre-university education sector including the teachers, employees and workers at government and private schools.

This decision is in line with the Presidential directives regarding the need to ensure safe start of the new school year as well as the growing expectation of the start of a fourth wave of the coronavirus in Autumn, with its new delta variant, which has swept across several countries, infecting young people and even children.

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, education has been severely disrupted for two successive years. Despite the country’s success in promoting online education, experiment proved that depending on e-learning as replacement of the direct interaction between students and teachers at schools and even universities, is not appropriate.

Actually, Egypt is not the only country that is considering resuming school and university attendance. Instead, many countries including the US which is currently facing rapid spread of the delta variant, have decided to return to traditional education after studies revealed the limited results of the e-learning strategy used by many countries to cope with the precautionary measures taken against this potentially deadly virus.

Along with the government’s plan to produce around 80 million doses of Sinovac vaccine by end of the year, Egypt seeks import other vaccines such as AstraZeneca and the Johnson & Johnson in order to speed up the vaccination process for all the vulnerable citizens and even have surplus for export to the African countries.

In the meantime, the Ministry of Health has expanded the number of vaccination centres to 657 nationwide with aim of vaccinating around 800,000 persons per day.

To ensuring swift vaccination of staff at schools and universities, the Ministry would co-operate with educational hospitals to help offer this service. In addition, the Ministry would direct research centres and institutes to establish their own permanent vaccination units to fulfill the mission by the start of the school year.

The question is how far the education staff would positively respond to this large-scale vaccination process? Will the vaccination be compulsory for all staff members and employees?

To overcome public resistance to vaccination, the government may need to launch a broad media campaign to enhance public awareness of the importance of vaccination as the ideal defense against coronavirus. Even though vaccination does not provide complete protection against the new variants, it is proved that it reduces the severity of symptoms of the disease.  Citizens need to be aware that vaccination has become inevitable protection against this virus, which seems to be a long-term threat to humanity.