Some Med schools, Nursing schools still Require COVID-19 Vaccine

By Daniel Nuccio - Northern Illinois University

Originally published by The College Fix

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While the majority of healthcare education programs across the nation have ended their mandatory COVID-19 vaccination requirements, there are still a few holdouts, prompting a medical watchdog to sound the alarm.

The requirements persist even though President Donald Trump issued an executive order in February to defund schools that mandate COVID-19 vaccinations, said Lucia Sinatra, co-founder of No College Mandates.

The organization is dedicated to ending COVID-19 vaccine mandates for college students, and Sinatra is calling on federal lawmakers to pass legislation to formalize Trump’s order into law.

While the order does not include a carve out for healthcare or health science programs, “For whatever reason, healthcare students and healthcare programs seem to be governed by different rules than general population student programs at colleges,” she told The College Fix in a telephone interview this month.

Sinatra said she does not have an exact number of med schools, nursing schools, and health science programs still mandating the COVID vaccine because, unlike the broad mandates from a couple years ago that were very explicitly and publicly posted, these can be somewhat obfuscated.

Some universities do not mention their mandates on program websites, while others do not have mandates of their own but only contract with clinical partners that do, she said. But information from programs that are open about their requirements, coupled with tips her organization receives from distraught students, indicate there is still a problem, she said.

The College Fix in June highlighted Texas Wesleyan University’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement for nursing students.

Other specific examples of such mandates include those imposed on medical students at the Emory University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as nursing students at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.

The College Fix reached out to representatives from both Emory University and Johns Hopkins University for comment via email but did not receive a response.

In general, Sinatra said her organization’s research has found that some programs “require compliance or you won’t be accepted to the program,” adding others may not require COVID-19 vaccination for admission, but may mandate it indirectly for completion of the program.

This happens, Sinatra said, when the clinical partners with which students would complete required practicums or rotations impose COVID-19 vaccination requirements different from those of a student’s educational institution or academic program.

Students in a variety of health science programs at the University of Washington, for example, although no longer required to be vaccinated for COVID-19 by UW, may still face such requirements from UW’s clinical partners.

However, in an email to The Fix, UW spokesperson Victor Balta stated these students do have options available if they are unvaccinated for COVID-19.

“UW Medicine, as a major clinical placement site for UW health sciences students, will not be requiring students placed at its facilities to have the COVID-19 vaccine,” Balta wrote.

Healthcare students at other schools, though, do not always have such options.

For example, those in the University of San Francisco’s Schools of Nursing and Health Professions are informed, “Nursing students should be aware that all of our clinical partners at which our students may be placed for clinical learning experiences are currently requiring all students to be fully vaccinated [for COVID-19] before beginning training and learning at the site…Degree completion may be slowed or stopped if SONHP students are unable and/or unwilling to be vaccinated, given the requirements of our clinical partners.”

Sometimes, though, Sinatra noted, students may not find out about requirements from a school’s clinical partners until after they are a couple years into their education.

Consequently, she said, this can lead to a lot of frustration among healthcare students and their families, as well as confusion over what was accomplished by Trump’s executive order.

The executive order stated: “It is the policy of my Administration that discretionary Federal funds should not be used to directly or indirectly support or subsidize an educational service agency, State educational agency, local educational agency, elementary school, secondary school, or institution of higher education that requires students to have received a COVID-19 vaccination to attend any in-person education program.”

She said she’s been reaching out to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Health Secretary Robert Kennedy to address the situation.

Sinatra also noted that although some mandates in some programs may be downstream of requirements by a school’s outside clinical partners, universities could arguably require the clinical partners with which they contract to refrain from imposing requirements stricter than those of the university or at least honor exemptions.

When asked about a bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Mark Messmer of Indiana that would “prohibit institutions of higher education from mandating COVID–19 vaccines for students or staff,” Sinatra said she saw the benefits it would provide to “general population students” if it were passed, as laws are harder to overturn than executive orders.

However, she said, the bill lacks explicit “protection for healthcare students who are the only college students still mandated to take COVID-19 vaccines.”

Subsequently, Sinatra said, she also has been reaching out to members of Congress “to get them to amend [the bill] to make sure they include medical schools and any partners of medical schools.”

“If it’s amended to include healthcare students through the entirety of their program so that they can reach completion, well then that’s a whole different bill,” Sinatra said. “Now we’re telling medical schools and their partner hospitals and their clinical partners, on the education part of their businesses, they cannot mandate these vaccines because those are college students.”

The College Fix emailed Rep. Messmer’s office regarding Sinatra’s concerns, but did not receive a reply.

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College Fix contributor Daniel Nuccio holds master's degrees in both psychology and biology. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in biology at Northern Illinois University where he is studying the impact of social isolation on host-microbe interactions and learning new coding techniques to integrate into his research.