Stanford "sunsets" COVID vaccine mandates

Stanford University sent this email to its community yesterday afternoon.

Effective Monday, April 10, the university will no longer require - but will continue to strongly recommend - COVID vaccinations and boosters for faculty, staff, postdoctoral scholars, and students.

This decision, based on a recommendation from the university's Public HealthSteering Committee, aligns with California Department of PublicHealth protocols. Vaccination requirements will remain in place for students and staff who work or rotate in Stanford health care facilities, in accordance with federal guidance.

Please keep in mind that vaccinations and boosters remain safe, effective tools. They significantly minimize the chances of serious illness, hospitalization, and death related to COVID.

I was as shocked as anyone. It comes much too late and the very large majority of their students and faculty complied with COVID-19 vaccine mandates, but incoming freshman and newly hired faculty will no longer be subject to this unethical and unscientific policy, and for that, we are grateful.

Stanford announced in April 2021 that students would be required to take the COVID-19 primary series prior to the fall 2021 semester. A few months later, in July 2021, we learned that the husband of a Stanford professor of law and medicine had a stroke a few days after his receiving his second COVID-19 shot, but doctors assured the family that the vaccine he took “hasn’t been associated with stroke”. When Professor Michelle Mello asked her husband’s medical team to file a VAERS report, the staff “shifted uncomfortably”, but she knew why. “Anti-vaccination groups are combing those reports looking for tidbits to support their claims that the vaccines are unsafe. They’re wildly misconstruing the data, leaping to unfounded conclusions about causality — and the Tucker Carlsons of the world are helping them.” Her husband agreed. While he was in the hospital recovering, he said he’d “still make the same decision if he had to do it over” so a few days later, they vaccinated their son on the advice of “one vaccine expert and two other doctors” who said “the risk your son faces from COVID is higher than the risk from the vaccine.”

In December 2021, when Stanford announced that students would be required to take a booster shot by January 31, 2022, Stanford students rose up and spoke out. They rightly determined that this booster requirement was “unethical and coercive” so they wrote this letter and collected over 3,000 signatures in support.

Let us be clear: requiring that students receive booster vaccines or be withdrawn from their courses and removed from the University is unethical and coercive. Is the basic human right of bodily autonomy no longer recognized by the University? Does the University recognize no bounds on its control over students' bodies? The mandate is nothing other than flagrant overreach and abuse of power. This is not who we are, and it must not be tolerated.

It is wrong to hold young people’s futures hostage in order to force them to receive novel medical treatments that they do not want. Let the booster be made widely available to anyone who wishes to receive it, and let “the wind of freedom blow” for those who do not wish to do so. There are many alternatives to keep the university safe without employing medical coercion and eroding the moral reputation of Stanford.

You have a choice, President Tessier-Lavigne, Provost Drell, and Associate Vice Provost Furr: are we a morally serious community which respects the freedom of its members to make informed decisions, or will the University trample on its least powerful members for the sake of a performative, unnecessary, and coercive measure?

Faced with deportation if they didn’t comply with booster mandates, international students also spoke out in opposition of booster shots. Among the points these students made were that additional COVID-19 vaccines presented risks for young health adults and that they did not prevent infection or transmission. Stanford never responded to the students’ concerns and Stanford refused to retract its COVID vaccine mandates. After several weeks of consideration, Stanford approved exemptions for students who had them on file, but one student who finished his coursework in November 2021 was almost prevented from graduating for refusing to take a booster shot that was mandated one month later in December 2021. If this sounds to absurd to be true, read Max Meyer’s story here.

One day prior to the booster mandate deadline, a Stanford Resident Assistant wrote to every student living in the building that he had witnessed a “gross inequity” perpetrated by white students. They refused to wear masks and they put other students at risk of “being killed or maimed for a lifetime.”

I am compelled to send this email because the overwhelming majority of masking non-compliance I have witnessed in our community has been from white students - a gross inequity. In addition to being a matter of public safety and interpersonal respect, compliance with our community masking requirement is a racial justice issue. As a white person who understands the historical relationship between white culture and infectious diseases, and has been personally traumatized by the callousness of anti-masking rhetoric and behaviors in my own life and globally, I find masking non-compliance to be extremely racist, triggering, disrespectful, and immature.

It is a mystery why this Resident Assistant acted out as radically as he did, but I’m sure it has nothing to do with indoctrination of the administrative state that Stanford has become. One student wrote that “Stanford now has more than 10,000 administrators who oversee the 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students—almost enough for each student to have their own personal butler.”

In June 2021, Steve Kirsch, the founder of Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, arranged a meeting with vaccine scientists, the Dean of Stanford Medical School, Lloyd Minor, and two of his colleagues to try to dissuade them from mandating COVID-19 vaccines. Steve and the vaccine scientists presented the data, and the Stanford administrators just listened without responding to any of their points. After the meeting, Steve and his team were dismissed and never again contacted by the Stanford administrators. Steve has written about Stanford’s vaccination policy many times on his Substack. You can read his essays below.

Stanford will no longer be requiring vaccination for students on April 10, 2023

Stanford tells doctors to give false information in order to overcome vaccine hesitancy

Why there are no debates on Stanford's vaccination policy

In case you missed it, Margaret Anna Alice wrote a longer version of Steve’s OpEd to the Stanford Daily.

Letter to the Stanford Daily

Jeff Childers wrote in his Substack earlier today that if “Biden does not sign the bill ending the COVID state of emergency, it will automatically become law on April 10th.” Coincidentally, Stanford chose to end its COVID vaccine mandate on April 10th. Other colleges are ending vaccine mandates to coincide with the end of spring semester, the end of the national state of emergency on May 11th and on arbitrary dates that seem to have no significance at all. With any luck, other other California and US universities will follow Stanford’s announcement because the absurdity of continued coercive and dangerous vaccination policies will only lead to more distrust.

Stanford has been having a rough year. For a University that hasn’t wanted to draw negative media attention ever since a Stanford swimmer was convicted of rape in 2016; they haven’t been doing a very good job. In fact, it seems Stanford can’t keep itself out of the news from Judge Kyle Duncan’s “Struggle Session at Stanford Law School” to “Stanford’s War Against Its Own Students”.

It is hard to know what the future holds for Stanford University, but try as they might to avoid controversy, public ridicule and bad judgement, they seem to get more and more steeped in it.