The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has affirmed that teachers should) be among those given priority access to the COVID-19 vaccines.
UNICEF’s chief, Henrietta Fore, made the call in a statement on Tuesday.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on children’s education around the globe. Vaccinating teachers is a critical step towards putting it back on track,” she said.
They should be “prioritized to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, once frontline health personnel and high-risk populations are vaccinated.
“This will help protect teachers from the virus, allow them to teach in person, and ultimately keep schools open.”
According to head of the UN children’s agency, “school closures disrupted the learning of almost 90 percent of students worldwide” at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic at the end of April.
Based on the fact that schools are not major factors of community transmission, the UNICEF stated that unfortunately, schools had )emain closed for “nearly one in five schoolchildren globally — or 320 million children.”
We must “do everything in our power to safeguard the future of the next generation. This begins by safeguarding those responsible for opening that future up for them,” Fore stated.
“The consequences of extended, missed or impaired education are steep, especially for the most marginalized. The longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return, and the more difficult it is for their parents to resume work,” she said.
The Covid-19 pandemic had left schools closed a few months after its outbreak in December 2019, plunging economies into recession and leaving over one million people dead.
