It is January 2024, and Covid vaccine mandates persist at 70 of the top 800 colleges in the US, and who knows if they will ever let them go. If you are a healthcare major, nearly every clinical partner site still mandates that healthcare students take the most updated Covid vaccine (often no exemptions accepted) even if those sites are affiliated with colleges and universities that do not currently mandate Covid vaccines.
It is truly remarkable with all that we have learned about these novel medical treatments that colleges can still coerce students into taking them. In fact, it is truly remarkable that any college ever announced Covid vaccine mandates in the spring of 2021 given that by this time the CDC (upon which the colleges dutifully and explicitly relied) knew they were ineffective at preventing infection and transmission. So, while we have all come to understand that mandating students to take Covid vaccines does very little if anything to protect the vulnerable members of the community, this remains the single biggest reason colleges put forth to explain why they mandate(d) them.
When colleges began preparing to return to in-person learning in the Fall of 2021, they built Covid dashboards to keep track of infection rates on campus. At that time, there were both large college systems and small colleges that never mandated Covid vaccines and that fared better week-to-week with Covid infection rates than other large and small colleges that mandated Covid vaccines.
I analyzed colleges in New Hampshire over several months only to find that the University of New Hampshire, which never mandated Covid vaccines and has triple the undergraduate enrollment of Dartmouth College, consistently had less Covid infections on their dashboard than Dartmouth, which announced a Covid vaccine mandate in April of 2021. I wrote to Dartmouth administrators countless times to point this out, but I either got no reply or no acknowledgement of my observations. Dartmouth ended their Covid vaccine mandate on April 11, 2023, two years after they implemented it, and after over 98% of their campus community had taken the initial series and at least one booster.
Prior to fall 2021, to help ensure a high uptake of Covid vaccines, Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General at the time, wrote an “Open Letter to Leaders in Higher Education” urging them to mandate Covid vaccines on college campuses. If colleges choose not to mandate Covid vaccines “we are asking leaders to take strong steps to get as close as possible to 100 percent of their students, faculty and staff vaccinated early in the academic year.”
Hellbound and Down 