Republican state governors and legislators who very recently were busy passing mandates against transgender students using school lavatories have lately become convinced that mandates are bad things.
That is, as long as those mandates are protecting students from a real, unimagined threat that has actually killed 4.5 million people worldwide in less than two years.
For some unfathomable reason, they insist that requiring measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 and its variants is nothing at all like previously existing requirements to protect students from measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, polio, and the like.
It is not as if this were a novel question of whether the general welfare is outweighed by an individual's right to be Typhoid Mary. The Supreme Court ruled in 1905 (Jacobson v. Massachusetts) that local boards of health could be authorized to mandate vaccination of the general population against smallpox. That ruling left open the possibility of exempting children from the mandate; but seventeen years later, the Court (Zucht v. King) let stand a school board edict — in Texas, no less — barring unvaccinated kids from classrooms.
It remains to be seen whether the current right-wing Court will overturn these long-established cases — nothing is certain under its present partisan domination. What is inevitable is that Big Government Republicans like Governors Abbott and DeSantis will do everything within and beyond their power to deny local school boards the ability to protect the staff and students in their charge.
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