If on campus, you can use this link to access the article<\/a>.<\/p>\nWhy Some Colleges Are Removing Their Covid-19 Vaccination Mandates<\/h4>\n
Francie Diep \/ The Chronicle of Higher Education \/ Aug. 30, 2022<\/p>\n
As the fall semester begins, thousands of students will return to campuses that have taken the uncommon step of dropping their Covid-19 vaccination mandates.<\/p>\n
Their rationales reflect the still-complicated reality of a policy once hailed as critical for getting \u201cback to normal\u201d on college campuses. Although few colleges have gone so far as to reverse existing mandates, the changed rules are part of a trend toward more relaxed Covid-19 protocols across all of higher education. And they reflect a country that\u2019s going back to normal with fewer vaccine mandates, not more.<\/p>\n
For some colleges, changes in state laws and politics forced the shift.<\/p>\n
Grinnell College had been the only college in Iowa to require students to be immunized against Covid-19 when state lawmakers passed legislation prohibiting such requirements at all licensed child-care centers and public and private schools and colleges until 2029. Now, said Ellen de Graffenreid, Grinnell\u2019s vice president for communications and marketing: \u201cWe\u2019re doing what we can with the environment we have.\u201d For example, she said, high-quality masks are required indoors for the first two weeks of the fall semester, recognizing that students may pick up infections while traveling to campus.<\/p>\n
When Glenn Youngkin became governor of Virginia in January, he signed an executive order ending the vaccine mandate for state employees, which includes workers at public colleges. The vaccination requirement was \u201charmful to their individual freedoms and personal privacy,\u201d the\u00a0executive order reads. Weeks later another newly elected Republican, Attorney General Jason Miyares, issued a\u00a0legal opinion\u00a0stating that public colleges can\u2019t compel their students to be immunized against Covid either. In response, George Mason University, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech,\u00a0among others, ended their requirements.<\/p>\n
Other colleges dropped their mandates of their own free will, without legal pressure. They cited other barriers.<\/p>\n
Salt Lake Community College leaders decided to end their campuswide requirement in April, after\u00a0hospitalizations and deaths\u00a0from Covid-19 in the surrounding county had declined steeply from their all-time highs in January 2022. The requirement had been challenging to administer, especially with the exemptions,\u00a0required by state law, to accommodate medical needs and personal beliefs, said Charles W. Lepper, vice president for student affairs. In addition, after some time, leaders noticed that student and employee vaccination rates had plateaued. The mandate, with its generous exemptions, wasn\u2019t pushing more people to get the shots, as mandates\u00a0often\u00a0can.<\/p>\n
At first glance, the University of Hawaii system might be a surprising entry on the list of colleges to voluntarily drop mandates. Hawaii is one of the\u00a0more highly vaccinated states\u00a0and, until March 2022, maintained strict vaccine-or-test requirements for visitors. Once that was lifted, however, so was the university system\u2019s mandate.<\/p>\n
Leaders feared that the old vaccine policy kept lower-income and underrepresented minority students from enrolling. The system doesn\u2019t have hard data showing so, said Lee Buenconsejo-Lum, an associate dean in the Manoa campus\u2019s school of medicine and adviser to the Manoa president on Covid policy, but \u201cthe campuses that were in communities with lower vaccination rates were the ones that were most concerned about the vaccine mandate exacerbating inequities.\u201d<\/p>\n
The system, which has 10 campuses, including universities and community colleges, is open to reinstating a Covid vaccine mandate in the future, she said. \u201cIf there\u2019s some huge shift and people get so sick they\u2019re being hospitalized and\/or we see the death rates going up again, then yeah, we\u2019d consider it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kent State University, the\u00a0University of Cincinnati,\u00a0Utah State University, and the nonresidential campuses of the\u00a0University System of Maryland\u00a0are other examples of institutions that ended mandates without legally being required to. In July, Roger A. Ramsammy, president of Hudson Valley Community College, tried to end his after he was told the student leadership thought it was \u201cfundamentally unfair\u201d that students had to be vaccinated while employees didn\u2019t. Ramsammy announced students didn\u2019t have to be vaccinated for the fall, at which point the State University of New York stepped in, saying Hudson Valley, a SUNY campus, had to adhere to the system\u2019s student mandate.<\/p>\n
Public-health experts had mixed opinions about the possible effects of a lifted Covid vaccine mandate. Rebecca L. Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign \u2014 which still has its vaccine mandate \u2014 said it was possible that a dropped mandate might not make too much of a difference to the wider community. The vaccines\u00a0still protect individuals\u00a0from getting seriously sick and dying from Covid-19. But, because the Omicron variant\u2019s latest subvariants are\u00a0very efficient\u00a0at infecting people who are vaccinated and boosted, it\u2019s unclear now how much one person\u2019s vaccine protects others.<\/p>\n
Still, she was glad UIUC maintained its mandate. \u201cI know that the vaccine protects people, and even if it\u2019s not effective at the community level, I want to see people protected,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Smith said the coming Omicron booster shots \u2014 to be rolled out next month \u2014 aren\u2019t a sure bet either because they\u2019ve been tested so far only in mice, using an expedited process similar to what\u2019s used for annual flu shots. (New flu variants also evolve too quickly for extensive human tests.) \u201cWe know it\u2019s safe,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe have hope that they will be more effective at preventing infection, but there\u2019s no certainty there because, of course, mice are not people.\u201d In a community where vaccine resistance is high, it\u2019s \u201cunderstandable\u201d that that uncertain community benefit may not be enough to justify a requirement, she said.<\/p>\n
Georges C. Benjamin, a physician and executive director of the American Public Health Association, said Covid vaccines\u2019 community benefits are still worth pursuing. The coronavirus will continue to evolve, and all it takes is a new variant causing an outbreak in a college or a college town. \u201cThen, you know, the question is what degree of an outbreak is that?\u201d he said. It could be mild, if \u201cthe vast majority\u201d of people are immunized. Or, without broad immune protection, it could be worse.<\/p>\n
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