Around 45,000 Portuguese teachers are still waiting to be vaccinated against Covid-19.
As the profession’s union Fenprof stresses: the only way to cut down on the incidence of cases in schools – which require classes to be put into isolation, sometimes whole schools to close down – is to ensure teachers are vaccinated.
Two weekends set aside last month for mass-vaccination of teachers and non-teaching staff went a long way to ensuring this, but didn’t manage to include everyone – and then there is the swathe of lecturers and college and university staff still waiting for their shots.
Explains SIC, “teachers feel they are living with uncertainty, their lives frozen”.
In just one ‘agrupamento’ (schools grouping) in Castêlo da Maia, half the teaching population has been vaccinated, the other half is still waiting to be called.
“We would like to have an explanation”, said Rosa Amaral, one of 179 teachers left out of the process so far.
Fenprof’s Mário Nogueira says the only way to deal with the problem is to hold a third ‘mass-vaccination weekend’ for teachers in various parts of the country.
For now, there has been response from the country’s task force. Under secretary of State for health António Lacerda Sales told SIC in any campaign of the size underway, some people are bound to be left behind, but the situation is being dealt with “as quickly as possible”.
