A new bill presented in California would allow children over 12 years of age to be vaccinated against Covid without the need to ask their parents for permission.
Currently in California it is not allowed that minors from 12 to 17 years old receive the Covid vaccine without the consent of their parents, despite the fact that there are some exceptions; in the county of San Francisco, for example, children older than 12 years can access the vaccine as long as their guardians agree to be inoculated.
According to Newsweew, if the Senate bill 866, which was authored by state senators Scott Wiener and Richard Pan, passes, vaccine providers will be allowed to inoculate children without prior permission.
This bill seeks to ensure that parents who have children between 12 and 17 years receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has been the only inoculation approved for children of the aforementioned age.
Senator Scott Wiener, in order to promote the bill, argued that if Children can already be vaccinated against HPV and hepatitis B without parental consent in California, so why not apply the same route in the face of the increase in Covid in minors.
“Dar young people the autonomy to receive va life-saving cribs, regardless of your parents’ beliefs or work schedules, is essential to your physical and mental health. It is inconceivable that adolescents are blocked from the vaccine because a parent refuses or cannot take their child to a vaccination site,” said Wiener.
He also pointed out that this would be a great opportunity to “Empower adolescents to make decisions about their own health and safety”.
And he highlighted that in California there are almost a million adolescents who are not inoculated against Covid because their parents refuse to vaccinate them or for some reason have not had time to take them to be vaccinated.