Twenty United States colleges continue to require their students to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the watchdog organization No College Mandates.
These mandates face increasingly heavy criticism from medical doctors and scholars who point to concerns regarding the vaccine’s safety, efficacy, and necessity.
Lucia Sinatra, co-founder of No College Mandates, an organization that tracks and advocates for the abolition of vaccine mandates, told The College Fix that such policies are “unreasonable and discriminatory.”
“One can only assume the purpose of this monthly testing is to discriminate against those who choose against COVID-19 vaccination and put undue pressure on them with the hopes they will tire of both the cost and routine of the monthly testing and succumb to the coercion to take COVID-19 vaccines,” Sinatra said in a recent email.
Both @waynestate and @SDSU finally dropped their ridiculous residential student C19 vaccine requirements and then there were 20. https://t.co/FXyuWjLfJI
— No College Mandates (@NCM4Ever) July 19, 2024
Many schools have been quietly retiring their vaccine mandates over the past year. The most recent of these include Wayne State University, which announced this month that it “strongly” recommends but no longer requires the vaccine.
San Diego State University also ended its mandate recently, according to No College Mandates. The number is down from approximately 100 colleges one year ago, according to an August 2023 report by The Fix.
However, 20 schools continue to require their students to receive the vaccine, including the Southern University System based in Louisiana and three California State University campuses, the watchdog reports.
SUS, a public university system, requires all students to receive the vaccine. Students may opt out through a letter of dissent or an exemption form but must submit a negative COVID test monthly, according to a vaccine protocol page on its website.
Professor Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University and senior scholar with the Brownstone Institute, told The Fix the motivation for colleges to continue vaccine mandates “is reflexive authoritarianism.”
“You see among the left their paranoia, trying to force students to conform to their arbitrary will without asking questions,” Zywicki told The Fix in a recent email.
He likened the futility of the mandates to “Japanese soldiers in the mountains of Okinawa thinking that World War II is still going on and charging out of the woods every so often.”
Four years after COVID-19 first began to spread, scientists are beginning to change their classification of the virus from pandemic to endemic, meaning it is here to stay, according medical scholars at Boston University.
A 2023 study in the Journal of Infection and Public Health found natural immunity is “equivalent” to vaccine-induced immunity in protecting against infection. According to the CDC’s COVID-19 Data Tracker, about 97 percent of the population has virus antibodies of some kind.
Dr. Paul Offit, an internationally recognized virology expert and physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told The Fix that while there were legitimate concerns about COVID-19 at first, it no longer carries the same threat.
“Covid-19 has entered the pantheon of respiratory viruses. Covid-19 has become similar in effect to the flu, so why treat it differently?” Offit said in a recent email.
A January study by the Centers for Disease Control found far fewer COVID-19 related cases of severe illness and death than there were four years ago. The study compared COVID-19 to the flu and found them to be quite “similar” in terms of severity.
Dr. Clayton Baker, a physician and former medical professor at the University of Rochester, pointed out the negative effects of vaccinations. A number of recent studies have linked the COVID-19 vaccines to “serious adverse event” risks, including myocarditis, pericarditis, and Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
He told The Fix in an email, “There are over 1.6 million VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] reports of adverse effects and over 38 thousand reports of deaths related to the COVID-19 injections.”
Baker expressed his frustration with colleges continuing to require the vaccinations, saying: “It’s not only unnecessary, I believe it is criminal. I would not send my child to any school still mandating COVID-19 vaccines. Who else requires it in any aspect of society? No one.”
