Saturday, May 15, 2021

Teachers getting fast tracked for vaccines?

Japan Today has posted a recent article highlighting why Japan is dragging its feet on the vaccine rollout, something I briefly talked about briefly in a previous post.

On the note of the vaccine, I sat in on the usual teachers' meetings at one of my schools. What was of particular note was regarding vaccines for the corona/CCP virus. Officially, the city is rolling out the vaccine for the elderly residents. However, it appears that due to there being excess vaccine left over, it is being offered to teachers for the next three weeks, which I think is a good thing, given they have regular exposure to children for extended periods of time. In addition, this seems to be available to teachers at all schools. But, due to most people getting flu-like symptoms that last around 3 days after taking the vaccine, they seem to be utilizing a system where so many teachers from each school at any one time (around 2-3) will go get the vaccine, before the next lot teachers go. This is apparently to reduce the impact of absent teachers needing time to recover from the flu-like symptoms after taking the vaccine.
While this is great news for them, there really hasn't been any mention of whether this would apply to ALTs, who also work at these schools. Since ALTs are subcontracted to work at these schools, we don't fall under the usual school pecking order, and I suspect that we would be ineligible for this time period.
I spoke to a fellow ALT about this, where they mentioned that teachers were asking them if they had any allergies to certain vaccines in the past, though didn't say outright anything about the CCP virus vaccine that all teachers would have access too. Despite no outright mention of it to them, it would seem to match up with what I heard at the teacher's meeting. 

I want to speak to the company about this, though I suspect that they might not know anything about this, as this seems exclusive to my current city. In any case, given that we are working in close contact with children (despite attempts at social distancing), it would be worthwhile finding out if there is any sort of vaccine program available to ALTs if there are extra vaccines that are sitting around being unused.

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