The End of College Covid Vaccine Mandates; but More Work to be Done

Originally Posted at The Brownstone Institute

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With one stroke of his pen, President Trump accomplished what we have been fighting for over the last 4 years – an end to college and university Covid-19 vaccine mandates. He signed an executive order to halt federal funding to all schools, including colleges and universities, that still impose Covid-19 vaccine mandates on students. While there are only 15 colleges and universities left mandating these shots, the magnitude of his message to higher education leaders should not be underestimated.

Covid-19 vaccine mandates on healthy young adults were never based on scientific data or sound reasoning, but they were harshly implemented nonetheless. These policies coerced a captive population of students to choose between abandonment of their college programs and dreams for the future or complying with decisions over bodily autonomy made by the “experts.”

Beginning in the spring of 2021, colleges and universities mandated students to take shots that never protected against infection or transmission of Covid-19. These mandates were imposed with the mantra that injections were the best way to “protect our community” from severe illness and death – a claim that proved false by the summer of 2021 just prior to mandated compliance for fall 2021 enrollment.

In fact, colleges that never had Covid-19 vaccine mandates had less infections and have no recorded history of severe illnesses or death among their campus communities as compared to colleges that did. It was easy to analyze these data using the colleges’ own Covid infection and vaccination rate dashboards until most of them scrubbed the dashboards from their college websites.

Over 1,000 colleges announced Covid vaccine mandates by the summer of 2021. After a concerted campaign by No College Mandates and other advocacy groups, by the spring of 2022, colleges had slowly begun dropping them. By the summer of 2023, very few colleges imposed the mandates on faculty and staff, but students were still required to comply.

Until this executive order, which tasked our new Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to develop a plan to end these coercive policies, our nation’s entire academic apparatus seemed perfectly fine with the continued application of these mandates on students. For example, at CSU Dominguez Hills and CSU Cal Poly Humboldt, only residential students are required to show proof of Covid vaccination prior to enrollment. At Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges only students are required to take Covid vaccines. No other members of the college community must comply.

Coercive and mandatory policies such as these alerted many of us to the fact that student health was not at the forefront of administrators’ concerns. Somehow, they perpetuated the draconian notion that only students were to blame for spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus and that only students must comply to put an end to the pandemic. College leaders knew such strategies were incoherent and illogical, yet they persisted almost entirely unchallenged.

From the very start, many of us lost trust in the hypocrisy of such inconsistencies. It was downright crazy for students to have to put up with such nonsense and risk injury from taking novel and needless medical treatments in the name of “protecting the community.” This is why we refused to stop shining a light on the injustice of it all.

It is with deep gratitude to President Trump and his team for keeping his promise and ending all federal funding to colleges and universities that continue these unnecessary and dangerous Covid-19 vaccine policies. There was zero science or reasoning to support them, and this new executive order might just prevent similar dictates from ever happening again.

But our work is far from done.

Healthcare students are still being forced to choose between their dreams and their autonomy to access hospitals and clinical facilities. To graduate, healthcare students must complete their clinical rotations, and hospitals and clinical facilities have required that these students take updated Covid vaccines even when faculty and staff no longer must comply. There is zero rationale for this patently retaliatory discrepancy.

In Florida, it is against the law for any “a business entity [to] require any person to provide any documentation certifying vaccination…or postinfection recovery from Covid, or require a Covid test, to gain access to, entry upon, or service from the business operations in this state or as a condition of contracting, hiring, promotion, or continued employment with the business entity.”

When I called the University of Florida Nursing Program a few weeks ago, however, I was told students are required to receive updated Covid vaccines to complete clinical programs with some providers. Making matters worse, some colleges smugly refuse to disclose these requirements to prospective or even enrolled students, often leaving them to learn about them in the final year of their program.

Ironically, but perhaps not unexpectedly, UF Nursing posted on X just last week that there is a nationwide nursing shortage including in the State of Florida. It blows my mind that those who determine policies affecting the training of our nation’s nurses were somehow unaware that their coercive and nonsensical policies would likely lead to such shortages. After No College Mandates drew attention to this on X, UF Nursing deleted the post.

In Montana, there is a similar problem. Montana law prohibits discrimination based on Covid vaccine status yet the Emergency Medical Technician program at Helena College still requires students to take Covid vaccines to enroll.

I have reached out to representatives in both states to report the college programs that are not following state law because if there is anything I have learned over the past several years, colleges and universities will get away with these discriminatory and punitive policies for as long as they can until someone steps in to put an end to them.

It is uncertain what will happen to healthcare majors whose colleges and universities no longer require injections to enroll but whose clinical partner assignments are still requiring them to complete clinical rotations to graduate. So, while President Trump took a huge step forward to end federal funding to colleges and universities that perpetuate unscientific and unreasonable Covid vaccination, it is not nearly enough to end the coercive policies at partner facilities when the unreasonable and unconstitutional mandates remain for many healthcare students who need to complete clinical rotations at those facilities.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that there are legislative efforts in at least 9 states* to completely ban mRNA shots. Such efforts promise to stop remaining Covid vaccine mandates dead in their tracks. Until we see those efforts make more progress, we will keep pressuring healthcare programs to end partnerships with hospitals and clinics when those facilities require students to receive Covid injections, and we will keep working with state representatives to hold clinical partners accountable for refusing to follow state law.

It is long overdue that our nation’s healthcare academies leave our healthcare students alone to make their own private decisions over what medical measures to take so they can pursue their dreams and help heal our very sick nation.

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*On February 15, 2024, the Idaho Senate blocked the vote to ban mRNA vaccines so as of right now Bill S1036 is dead, and Idaho should no longer be on the map of 9 states.