Should Scottish schools follow Italy and insist on vaccinating all pupils?

Teens, the veteran left-winger declared, will not get back in to their classrooms after the summer break unless there is a mass campaign of vaccination.

It is shots for kids or it is remote learning, warned De Luca, to squeals of protest, including claims his entire stance was unconstitutional.

Campania - with Naples, Europe’s most densely populated city, at its heart - has been moving fast to jab kids, and teachers. Its programme is the most advanced in Italy.

Last week De Luca ratcheted up his words again. “In the middle of September we will check the situation in all the schools,” he said, according to regional daily Corriere del Mezzogiorno. “If we fail to reach a threshold of 70% immunisation, head teachers will have to maintain a double regime: vaccinated students in class and unvaccinated ones in distance learning.

“We hope that this hypothesis cam be a avoided and that we will only have classroom teaching.”

De Luca may be taking a hard line. But Campania is just one of a number of nations and regions across the continent rolling out school vaccination programmes.

Spain, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, France, Hungary, Austria and Belgium are all doing so - to one extent or another. Greece has announced it will give 150 euros worth of travel and entertainment vouchers to under-26s, including teens, who get jabbed.

Their aim: to stop high schools becoming petri dishes for new strains of the virus, to prevent youngsters spreading the disease, and to minimise disruption to education.

Scotland last week announced it would jab some older teenagers but, like the rest of the UK, is wary about going further.

Many countries, including the United States, late this spring formally approved various vaccines, including Pfizer/Biotech, for teenagers.

Britain’s The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation or JCVI last week advised that the same jab should be offered to “young people aged 16 to 17 with underlying health conditions which put them at higher risk of serious COVID-19”. The Scottish Government has been following the JCVI guidance.

Scotland and the UK’s relative tardiness on teen vaccinations comes amid concerns that Covid will rip through young people this summer, especially as the new Delta variant prevails.

Figures from Public Health Scotland last week showed that under a quarter of under 19s had Covid antibodies - far lower than among vaccinated age groups.

“Are we ready for a wave of infection in young people 0-18 (who largely don't have access to a vaccine now)?” Tweeted Devi Sridhar, global public health professor at Edinburgh University. “I’m concerned that JCVI isn't paying attention to the U.S. and other countries and is instead focused on internal modelling. Delta is a game-changer. I can understand the decision to start with priority 12-plus groups, then expanding to all as supply arrives. But then say that openly.”

Sridhar concluded: “The choice increasingly isn't 'vaccine or nothing’: it's 'vaccine or infection’.”

Experts like Sridhar acknowledge these are not easy discussions. But there does seem to be a subset of people in Scotland and the rest of the UK who are simply not prepared to accept vaccines for ‘children’.

Britain has not seen the extreme vaccine hesitancy experienced in other parts of Europe, such as France and Russia. But vaccinations for teens and younger children, unlike those for adults, have become controversial in the UK, at least in some quarters.

Take Neil Oliver. The Scottish TV historian turned anti-lockdown polemicist has has no medical or public health qualifications. Earlier this month, however, he declared it was “nothing less than grotesque” to jab kids. Oliver told GB News, a new TV channel aimed at a niche rightist audience, that “never before in medical history has there been a proposal to vaccinate children against a disease that poses them no measurable harm”.

So far governments in the UK have not come under much fire for not vaccinating teens, despite the huge disruption in classrooms before the summer when entire bubbles of children were sent home.

Campania is about the same size as Scotland, has densely populated urban areas with poverty, a mountainous rural hinterland and islands.

But it is taking a completely different path on teen vaccinations. Its experience does offer a chance to see what such an alternative might look and feel like.

Scotland, even if had started at the same time as Campania, would not have been able to get needles in the arms of the nation’s secondary pupils in time for the next term. Our schools go back sooner - in Naples, as on much of the continent they start in September. De Luca later last week suggested he would even be willing to delay the start of the school year and that jabbing teens was his “priority”.

“If our aim is to immunise everyone, them we will do that, even at the cost of dealing the start of the school year,” he said. “It would be a disaster to have half the students in the classroom and half distance learning. We have to avoid that.”

There is context here. The last school year in Naples was devastated with children missing huge chunks of the year. There were other problems too - familiar around the world - such as high levels of dropping out.

But there is another bit of background. Italy’s technocratic Prime Minister “Super” Mario Draghi has passed a decree for something called a “green pass”, a way those who are vaccinated can move more freely than those who are not. The pass, an extension of the EU’s Covid vaccine certificate, enables people to take long trains, planes and long-distance buses - and enjoy indoor dining. It is set to be reviewed in September.

De Luca is not quite demanding green passes for students. And Draghi’s edict makes no mention of education.

However, on Friday one of the most famous schools in Naples, the historic Convitto Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II right on the city’s central Piazza Dante, announced staff and pupils, except little ones, would need to show a green pass if they have one.

“ I am doing this not to exclude the unvaccinated, who, regardless, will naturally be able to get in to the school,” said Silvana Dovere, the headteacher. “This monitoring is necessary for us to understand which of our pupils are immunised for planning spaces, classrooms and dining halls.”

Her is the first in Italy to check whether pupils and staff have the jab. She is making clear her decision to do so is not political, but practical.

“I am not very interested in wars and diatribes between pro and anti-vax campaigners,” Dovere added. “I am a public official and have to organise activities as best I can under the conditions given, without excluding anybody but with safety for all.” Crucially, Dovere is not demanding teachers get vaccinated.

No jabs, no school, has been dubbed the De Luca doctrine. Italy’s rightist politicians are already fuming about the Green Pass. Matteo Salvini has condemned the scheme for not letting Italians get a pizza without a vaccine. What will the rhetoric be if De Luca sends youngsters without jabs home?