Tennessee will resume school-based vaccination events next week after putting them on hold over concerns from state legislators.
The state health department will also continue providing the vaccine to older teens without parental consent if necessary, which is what Republican leaders had expressed urgent concerned about.
The state’s health commissioner, Dr. Lisa Piercey, says the pause was an effort to be responsive to concerns from the legislature, since they represent the will of the people. Several lawmakers had said the state should tone it down on outreach to kids about the vaccine.
“It is our job to educate and encourage and make it accessible, and then stop,” she said during a briefing with reporters Friday.
Last week, some of the same lawmakers who first raised concerns dropped their threats against the department. But the Tennessee Department of Health isn’t stopping much of what prompted the initial backlash over youth vaccinations, except deleting some social media posts.
Lawmakers printed out images of kids who’d been vaccinated and held them up during a hearing in June, insisting they be removed. Piercey says in the future, posts will also have a parent in the picture.
Piercey would not comment directly on firing her vaccine director, Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who wrote the memo laying out the precedent for vaccinating teens without parental consent as a last resort. In a previous written statement, she said her firing was related to poor performance, despite mostly glowing performance reviews.
But when asked on Friday, she did lay out her philosophy on hiring and firing in the health department, saying she works for Gov. Bill Lee and so does her team.
“It is my job and my responsibility to make sure the policies and the personnel within the department are operating in the course of his vision and in our belief about the appropriate role of government,” she said.
Urban health departments unaffected
Piercey says she has very little control over the six urban health departments in Tennessee, including the Metro Public Health Department. Nashville has been hosting vaccination events at schools for the last few weeks, including Thursday at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Antioch.
Brandon Williams — a father who brought his two middle schoolers to get routine vaccinations, not the COVID show — said he was glad to see lawmakers step in to tone down the vaccine push to teens.
“I’m not one of those people that particularly like the government forcing us to do things,” he said. “This is the land of the free.”
There’s no evidence any teens have been coerced to get a COVID shot, though state lawmakers have described anecdotes shared with them by constituents.
Even with the health department resuming the youth vaccination push, some pediatricians say the damage has been done with lawmakers amplifying vaccine misinformation during their debates.
“This just makes our job that much harder,” says Dr. Amy Evans, who runs a practice in the rural community of Sewanee. “I think we’ll see more vaccine hesitancy.”
‘It’s not just about me’
And the timing is not good.
School in Tennessee starts back for most students in a few weeks, in-person and maskless. The delta variant wave is threatening much of the under-vaccinated South — with infections rebounding 200% in Tennessee this month, almost entirely among the unvaccinated.
“This is like the black plague. People need to realize that,” says Kelley Foxworth, who was getting her sixth-grade grandson vaccinated this week at JFK Middle School. She says it was an easy decision given her family’s experience with COVID: Her aunt died on a ventilator in Detroit.
Foxworth says she’d prefer that parents be required to vaccinate their kids who are going back to school, because so many are only thinking of the risk to themselves or their children.
“Yes, it’s a personal choice. But I have to think about my neighbor,” she says. “So it’s not just about me. It’s about everybody around me.”
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM