A Michigan township had to shut down its schools this week because so many staff members experienced “negative reactions” to the COVID-19 booster shots.
Saginaw Township Community Schools announced on its website over the weekend that, due to being understaffed, schools in the district would be closed on Monday.
“A large number of our staff had a negative reaction to the COVID booster shot given at a voluntary clinic over the weekend,” officials said in a statement. “There is a substitute teacher/staff shortage throughout the state, further complicating the availability to cover those absences.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration approved booster shots for large swaths of the population last month in spite of recommendations from medical advisers to hold off on boosters.
Two top FDA officials even resigned from the agency in protest of the booster shot push.
“Careful and public scrutiny of the evolving data will be needed to assure that decisions about boosting are informed by reliable science more than by politics,” Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review; and her deputy director, Phil Krause, wrote in an article after announcing their resignations.
The experts suggested there is no evidence to support booster shots and warned that Biden administration officials were primarily relying on “confounding and selective reporting” to justify booster shots.
“Widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate,” the authors wrote, arguing that vaccines should be allocated to unvaccinated populations instead.
FDA employees familiar with Gruber’s and Krause’s decisions to step down said Biden’s booster strategy triggered a “mutiny” in the agency from employees who agree that the Biden administration jumped the gun.
