By Bostom, et al.
The Federalist

The excessively narrow medical exemptions for COVID vaccine mandates at many colleges put students at unnecessary risk of serious complications, including hospitalization and death.

More than 520 of America’s 5,300 colleges and universities, approximately 10 percent, have announced students must be fully vaccinated against COVID before they return for fall classes. Among these institutions are the public universities of California and New York, pending full U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of the vaccines. Together, these two systems enroll approximately 1.5 million students.

Other state universities that have enacted vaccine “mandates” include the universities of Michigan and Maryland, as well as Indiana University. Scores of private institutions have also mandated COVID vaccines, including Yale, Stanford, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Notre Dame, Emory, Brown, Syracuse, Boston University, and Princeton.

We think that these mandates are unethical, chiefly because they indiscriminately require administering an experimental biological agent in the setting of a clinical investigation to a population that is at greater risk of harm from the drug than from COVID. Our advice to schools that have not yet adopted vaccine mandates is: don’t.

But where participation in the investigational vaccination program is nevertheless required by university policies, there must be sensible, medically sound policies for granting medical exemptions.

Many Exemptions Policies Are Medically Unsound

All the colleges and universities that have announced mandates have also indicated they will grant medical exceptions. Some have publicly made available the criteria according to which they will decide exemption petitions.

We have examined many of these rubrics. The narrow scope of these medical exemptions is alarming: the exemptions are so medically unsound and unduly restrictive that they create a clear and present danger to the health, and potentially, the lives, of students subject to these mandates.

In our professional medical judgment, these published protocols are deficient in at least four crucial respects. Any sound policy for granting medical exemptions from COVID vaccine mandates must avoid all four of these mistakes. A school making any one of them endangers its students. A school making all four is headed for a catastrophe.

Four Major Mistakes These Policies Make

First, none of the schools whose published criteria we have examined include the most elementary medical ground of all: natural immunity from a previous COVID infection. At Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, the website asks students: “already had COVID? You still need to show proof of vaccination for in-person attendance.”

The Cornell website’s reply to whether students should get vaccinated even with a prior infection is “Yes.” Notre Dame made this especially clear when summer school opened. At first, the university website said that “lab results showing your immunity” would be acceptable proof of a vaccine. Then it abruptly changed. It now states that “lab results showing your immunity…does not include Covid 19 antibody testing.”

The scientific data demonstrate that the natural immunity acquired by previous COVID infection is at least as durable and effective as that provided by the vaccines. The data also shows that those who possess this natural immunity present no greater risk of transmitting the virus to others than those who have been vaccinated.

Every school justifies its mandate by claiming this is the only effective way to maintain a safe campus environment. But jabbing students who are already immune contributes nothing whatsoever to campus safety. All that it does, medically speaking, is create danger.

Requiring the immune to get vaccinated exposes these students to a significant risk of excess adverse reactions, especially of thrombosis and myocardial inflammation, neurologic injury, and possibly of death. Several published studies suggest, moreover, a significantly increased risk of adverse reactions to the vaccine among those previously infected. There is no reason to put the hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of students who possess natural immunity in such danger.

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Via https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/05/how-college-covid-vaccine-mandates-put-students-in-danger/