Then, later today, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced in a speech that the state is taking just that step.

Newsom said that, in order to participate in in-class instruction, students in both government and private schools in California will be required to receive experimental coronavirus vaccine shots. The mandate will be imposed on students in successively lower age groups as the United States Food and Drug Administration successively approves vaccines for younger age groups of children.

The mandate, Newsom said in his speech, also requires school employees to take the shots.

In his speech, Newsom proclaimed the new vaccine mandate will kick in as soon as January 1 for all students 12 years old and up, as well as for all school staff. Then, "months away," said Newsom, is the "second phase" when all younger students on down to kindergartners will be required to receive experimental coronavirus vaccine shots.

Newsom, seeking to provide justification for the new statewide vaccine mandate, even preposterously declared in his speech, "we hope this encourages folks to get vaccinated." Of course, mandates are coercion, not encouragement.

At least for now, the new vaccine mandate is set to have exemptions available based on medical, religious, and philosophical grounds, Newsom said in answer to a question from a reporter after the speech. But, Newsom also said in discussing exemptions in that answer that the legislature and governor could later make the mandate more or less strict. There is only a very hard to come by medical exemption for other mandated vaccines for schoolchildren in California.