Lucy Carne: Teachers should have to wait their turn for COVID-19 jab

Teachers deserve gratitude and recognition for their hard work, but are being tarnished by their union’s political posturing, writes Lucy Carne.

Here’s a question for the class. Hands up if you know the answer.

What medical evidence indicates that a young teacher in a regional area, where coronavirus is non-existent, should be vaccinated before a 97-year-old war veteran living with relatives or a 19-year-old with leukaemia?

If your answer is “bugger all”, well done, you get a sticker!

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But don’t let scientific reality get in the way of a power play.

Blinded by self-inflated value, our teachers’ unions are now demanding that teachers leapfrog the COVID-19 vaccine queue and be considered front line workers alongside aged care, quarantine hotel and hospital staff.

The Queensland Teachers’ Union president Cresta Richardson expressed disappointment last week that teachers had not been identified higher in the federal government’s vaccine roll out. She said that the union would advocate for Queensland’s 100,000 registered teachers to be “bumped up” the list. “Our view is that we should be seen as a priority, as a workforce group, within the vaccination rollout list, alongside other frontline workers,” Ms Richardson told the media.

Teachers’ unions want teachers to be prioritised for the COVID-19 vaccine. Picture: Getty Images

Independent Education Union of Australia NSW/ACT branch secretary Mark Northam has also said educators should be fast tracked to at least the second phase of the vaccine rollout alongside “critical and high risk” workers including defence, police, fire and emergency services and meat processing facility staff.

But the unions’ insistence on jab priority contradicts consistent data that children and schools are not super spreaders or hot spots.

“We know children are at the lowest risk of getting COVID and transmitting COVID,” Health Department secretary Professor Brendan Murphy said last week.

US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr Robert Redfield reiterated in a November briefing to the White House that schools were the best place to be in a pandemic and that children caught the virus from family members – not classmates or teachers. “The truth is, for kids K-12, one of the safest places they can be, from our perspective, is to remain in school,” he said.

England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam told a coronavirus briefing last month: “Is there a clear signal in the data of a markedly increased rate of infection or mortality in teachers? No.”

But these inconvenient facts seem irrelevant to teachers’ unions, who have become manipulative political lobbying machines rather than traditional workers’ groups fighting for fair pay.

Professor Brendan Murphy has repeatedly said children are low risk. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

The whole point of the vaccine is to minimise loss of life and help protect us from further lockdowns.

Intense consultation and planning has gone into deciding who will get Australia’s first doses of the Pfizer vaccine from tomorrow.

Among the Phase 1A recipients will be disability and aged care residents and their staff. And so they should be prioritised – 678 of Australia’s 909 COVID deaths were in aged care facilities.

The global average age of death from COVID-19 is now 72.8 years, according to research published in Scientific Reports last week.

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Yet the average age of teachers in Australia is 42, according to the OECD.

Schools are also safe with regular cleaning measures and hand sanitisation procedures more strictly enforced than in other work areas such as retail.

Looking at the UK’s Office of National Statistics data from March to December last year on COVID deaths by occupation, female nurses were 50 per cent more likely to die than other working women. Male nurses were more than twice as likely to die than other men in the workforce.

If teachers should jump the vaccine queue, why shouldn’t supermarket workers? Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Geraghty

Even bus and taxi drivers had a higher average death rate than teachers. How many times must it be said that teachers are not “at risk”. You can only imagine how mortified some members would be that their union insists they should skip the queue ahead of those more vaccine worthy.

Teachers deserve gratitude and recognition for their hard work and dedication to schooling our children but are being tarnished by their union’s posturing.

By bending to union force and prioritising teachers, the government would create an alarming precedent.

What happens when other professions make similar requests given their interactions with the public?

What about supermarket workers, childcare educators, real estate agents or hairdressers?

What about all those people who don’t have the luxury of staying home on full pay with job security during lockdown?

It is logically inconceivable that teachers’ unions would pressure the government to deny a vaccine to those who need it more just to appease their militant demands.

With the vaccine roll out starting Monday, there is cautious hope that this is the beginning of the end. But we need to be sensible.

Now is the time for teachers’ unions to remember that valuable lesson from school. It’s called ‘wait your turn’.