Say, do you remember the bad old days of the COVID vaccine mandates? Those were no fun. Thankfully, most of that is behind us now and we continue to learn more and more about how the government mishandled the situation. But the vaccine mandates are not over for everyone. As the Daily Wire reports this week, colleges and universities in many locations around the country seem to be hooked on vaccine mandates and they can’t break their addiction. More than 100 schools are still making the COVID vaccine a requirement to be admitted. But for some reason, the faculties at most of these schools are exempt from the mandate, making the policy all the more nonsensical.
More than 100 colleges and universities are still enforcing COVID vaccine mandates for students — some three years out from the start of the pandemic.
A report from No College Mandates lists 104 colleges and universities still requiring COVID vaccinations, including Harvard University, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers University, DePauw University, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Pittsburgh, and San Diego State University.
According to COVID policies outlined on some of these schools’ websites, staff and faculty are sometimes required to be vaccinated, too, The Daily Wire has reviewed. Additionally, some of the schools permit religious or medical exemptions.
The group No College Mandates assembled a list of 104 colleges and universities still imposing a vaccine mandate. Some of them are even mandating booster shots. They also keep track of students who run afoul of the policy and what happens to them. One young woman was booted out of Union College in April for the sin of requesting an exemption from the booster mandate. She had gotten the original shots but became very ill after taking the second one and she submitted her request for an exemption on the advice of her doctor. She is in the process of taking the school to court over the decision.
The linked report has a great list of references demonstrating how the medical community still doesn’t fully understand the full effects of these vaccines. There are continued reports of side effects being experienced and it’s difficult to pin down the true efficacy of the shots. This makes it all the harder to justify the choice to make them mandatory at schools.
Further, we’re talking about 17 and 18-year-olds primarily. This is one of the least likely groups to have a severe case if they do manage to catch COVID. So if they don’t have any underlying conditions putting them at greater risk, they should be the last people we need to be lining up for mandatory vaccinations.
Part of that group may be exposed to a different type of risk, however. According to more than one study, young males experience adverse cardiac events after taking the vaccines. It still hasn’t been definitively blamed on the vaccine and might be caused by the virus itself. But we don’t have a conclusive answer from the medical community yet. Yet these schools are still forcing all of those young males to take the shots or forgo their college education.
And why are the members of the faculty exempt if the students are not? If the vaccines are so important, shouldn’t the staff be vaccinated as well? They could wind up contracting the virus and spreading it to an entire classroom or lecture hall. Some of those professors are undoubtedly considerably older. If anything, they would fall into the higher-risk category. These policies seem to have been deliberately crafted in a backward fashion.
From the beginning of the entire experiment with vaccine mandates and passports, I was just sitting and waiting for it all to be over. And in 2023, it really finally felt like we had put this behind us. But this report demonstrates that the bogeyman is still lurking out there and being kept afloat at many colleges. This is beyond disappointing. Let people make up their own minds about the medical treatment they choose to get.
