Teachers' group calls for schools 'without the anti-vaccination populism'

The association said mass vaccination is "one of the key achievements of modern civilization" and that its positive effects had been proved over more than a century.

"All comments being pushed as mere scepticism, caution, or critical thinking are just a poor cover for the anti-scientific, anti-civilisational, petty-political and populist humouring of formerly bad school pupils and for going back to the Middle Ages," it added.

They added that "a pandemonium started" following the recent Covid passes mandate for schools, criticizing epidemiologists and the national Covid-19 task force for thinking of the education system "only now, instead of prioritizing it when vaccination began" or when the Delta variant appeared.

Some teachers "scream that this is an attack on personal freedoms because they don't want to get vaccinated, some don't even want to get tested," while others agree with the measure because "they hope to help in curbing the galloping and horrifying number of those falling ill."

"Unions wonder why it is easier to enter a betting shop than a classroom, and ask what will happen to tuition if unvaccinated teachers leave the system, as if schools were not institutions to which it is mandatory to go, where different rules apply than in betting shops and bars," the association said.

"Schools should be the first to introduce mandatory Covid passes, irrespective of what goes on in betting shops and bars, because civilization was established on the foundations of knowledge, reason and science, which are based on schooling," the association said.

"Evidently, unions believe what a part of the population believes, that a school is a service activity in which the client is always right - but it is not, it is a public institution serving for the elementary and then the comprehensive literacy of those who attend it," Teachers Organised said in a press release carried by state agency Hina.