College Mandates from the Primary Series to the Bivalent Booster

Despite a growing body of evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause myocarditis, menstrual cycle disruptions and many other known and potentially unknown adverse events, there are over 1,000 colleges that continue to mandate primary series vaccines and over 300 colleges that continue to mandate at least one booster dose. 

On top of that, some colleges have recently announced they will require students to get the new bivalent booster shot. For students who have already received one booster dose, this means they will be required to get a second booster dose to remain matriculated.

Fordham University was one of the first universities to force compliance with its bivalent booster mandate. If students and employees did not comply by November 1st, Fordham stated that they would run the risk of being banned from campus, disenrolled or fired.

According to The Student Life, a newspaper serving The Claremont Colleges, Scripps College announced that students are required to take the bivalent booster prior to returning to campus following winter break, and Harvey Mudd announced that students are required to get a bivalent booster “after a spike in cases” on campus.

Notre Dame announced that they will require the bivalent booster as a condition of enrollment for the 2022-2023 academic year including students who are “studying or performing research remotely and/or virtually.” They have zero scientific data to determine if this new vaccine is “safe and effective” especially for healthy young adults. In addition, Notre Dame doesn’t seem to care how utterly idiotic they look mandating a shot for variants and strains that will be extinct by next school year. If you ask for their reasons for mandating this booster (and other COVID-19 vaccines), you either won’t get a response or they will falsely claim that vaccine uptake “protects the community.” To summarize, this new announcement means that both students living on campus and studying remotely who have already taken the monovalent booster will be forced to take the bivalent booster for a variant which will soon be extinct as a condition to enrollment for next school year. I can’t make any sense of it.

To date, most colleges that have one booster mandate have not mandated a second booster, but the announcements are not over, and we expect more bivalent booster mandates to come. For thousands of college students, this means they will be required to get a second booster dose that was approved without any human clinical trials to establish the safety and efficacy of the new formula and that was rushed through development. In addition, there is new data emerging that continued vaccination against COVID-19 might make students more susceptible to an increased number of infections. To force COVID-19 vaccines on an overwhelmingly healthy young adult population is neither justified nor safe. College students were striped of informed consent when mandates were first imposed. This is the most egregious violation of medical ethics, and it must be restored.

The image below captures the colleges and universities that have explicitly stated they will mandate the bivalent booster.

Given that colleges have zero basis for requiring this young adult population to get a second booster, my advice is stay far away from these so-called institutions of higher learning.  If colleges refuse to apply critical thinking in reviewing emerging data which overwhelmingly supports a walk back of all COVID-19 vaccine mandates, how can they be expected to teach your students?

Each day, our team at No College Mandates updates our database of over 1,000 US colleges that both mandate and do not mandate COVID-19 vaccines. The spreadsheet also contains notes with additional information such as which schools require one booster and which schools require a second booster.

A new addition to our Website is a list of California Community Colleges that either never mandated or no longer mandate COVID-19 vaccines.  You can access this list by clicking on the image below.

We recently received this letter from the President of Cabrillo College, a community college in Aptos, California.

This letter came in response to our 5th letter campaign which we launched 3 months ago urging colleges to immediately halt unethical and unscientific COVID-19 vaccine mandates or potentially face legal liability. We have received a handful of responses from colleges as a result of our letter campaigns, but most of them don’t deliver the good news that they have lifted all vaccine mandates. To date, there are a few colleges that have been open to changing policies based on the realization that the vaccines do not prevent transmission, but it remains frustrating and angering that more colleges refuse it accept this fact even though public health agencies have openly admitted it.

Letter to Colleges on Updated CDC Guidelines - 5th Campaign

On August 4th, Wake Forest announced that they planned to mandate the bivalent booster as soon as it was available for distribution, but on October 12th they provided an update to the community that they “strongly recommend all community members continue to receive variant-updated boosters for COVID-19 and flu each year.”

Bowdoin College recently dropped its booster mandate and Cornell University dropped their booster mandate last academic year. While there is no data to justify keeping any COVID-19 vaccine mandates in place for college students, we must be grateful for the updates to policies that don’t force additional vaccines.

Have your student shop carefully, choose wisely and please do not donate to colleges that mandate vaccines. Until they are financially hurt over their vaccine mandate policies, colleges will continue to espouse outdated narratives that COVID-19 vaccines protect the community and are necessary to keep transmission numbers low when they have known for over one year that these claims are simply not true.

Lucia Sinatra, Co-founder, No College Mandates