Why Are Health Care Students Still Forced to Get COVID-19 Boosters?

Guest Post by: Dr. Clayton Baker

Originally published on February 28, 2024 at Minding the Campus

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A tremendous injustice is taking place in health care education, and most people are entirely unaware of it.

Today, almost four years since the COVID pandemic began, nearly all U.S. medical students, nursing students, and students training in other health care fields are still being forced to choose between accepting continual booster doses of the COVID mRNA vaccines or being kicked out of their training programs.

This remains so, even though many institutions that enforce these mandates on health care students do not do so for faculty, staff, and patients.

This remains so, despite the fact that among the nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., only *67 still require COVID vaccination for their undergraduate students—and even some of those holdouts do not require boosters. However, many of these same institutions that have rightly dropped mandates for their general student population still mandate COVID vaccination and boosters for health care students.

This injustice needs to end.

First, it is outright discrimination. It is unconstitutional, unlawful, and wrong. No mandate, especially one requiring submission to an invasive medical treatment, should be made on the basis of an individual’s age, level of education, or rank in an organization. Health care students must enjoy equal protection under the law, equivalent to all others working in medical schools and hospitals.

Second, it does not stop disease spread. By now, it has been firmly established—without further argument from vaccine manufacturers or the CDC—that COVID-19 mRNA boosters do not create sterilizing immunity for individuals and do not produce a herd immunity effect for the population. In fact, the CDC’s own website makes no mention whatsoever of prevention of contraction or transmission of COVID-19 in its description of “Benefits of Getting a COVID-19 Vaccine.”

Put simply, if I compel you to take a vaccine that neither stops you from contracting the disease nor stops you from transmitting the disease, this will not protect me from the disease. Forcing medical and nursing students to take repeated COVID-19 boosters does not protect patients.

It does, however, endanger students.

The dangers of repeated COVID-19 boosters, especially in adolescents and young adults, are being increasingly acknowledged. The risks of vaccine-induced myocarditis and other severe and even deadly side effects are real and significant. Mandating repeated boosters at this late date, in an age group with a COVID-19 case-fatality rate of less than 1 in 30,000 is wrong. The risk-to-benefit ratio is not even close to being favorable.

So why are COVID-19 vaccines and boosters still being mandated for health care students?

Ask that question, and you are met with the same circular-finger-pointing excuses that shut down schools during the pandemic. No one claims responsibility, but everyone permits and promotes the injustice.

Even more troubling, health care students are commonly subjected to a cruel and dishonest game of bait-and-switch. According to the student advocacy group No College Mandates, “a healthcare student can secure a [vaccine] exemption for enrollment to study for a healthcare degree at the University of Pennsylvania or the University of Pittsburgh, but that same student cannot be placed in clinical rotations…unless they show proof of updated COVID vaccinations.”

When confronted, the universities often blame the clinical training sites with which they are affiliated. However, most schools do little or nothing to accommodate the students to whom they themselves granted exemptions, such as finding clinical sites that do not mandate boosters. Again, according to No College Mandates, one California State University department chair even declared “until 100% of [our] clinical sites drop the COVID vaccine requirement, our department will still require it.”

Clinical sites, in turn, commonly cite local or state statutes—often vaguely or inaccurately—to justify their policies. John Coyle, attorney for a class action suit against Rowan College in New Jersey, characterizes schools blaming their clinical partners as a “shell game.”

There is likely an underlying and utterly non-medical reason these mandates persist. A covert screening process, often used in large corporations’ Human Resources departments, appears to be taking place—this is an effort to weed out any and all individuals who do not passively comply with all regulations, however invasive or unnecessary they may be.

Such an approach poses grave dangers to the profession of medicine and to patient care. The history of medical progress, especially when it comes to good patient care, is filled with examples of reformers who fought harmful medical orthodoxy—and who were initially vilified. “Weeding out” independent minds who question convention in favor of submissive, incurious drones will have disastrous effects on patient care.

If a mandate does not apply to everyone, it should not apply to anyone. This is fundamental to equal protection under the law in the U.S.

Practically speaking, these institutions should immediately drop these unjust, unconstitutional, and unhealthy mandates for their own good as well as that of their students. The COVID-19 pandemic is over. No COVID-19 emergency exists. Institutions that persist will be held accountable over time, and the legal jeopardy they place themselves in by continuing these mandates is potentially immense.

Health care students must take note of the unnecessary risks their universities are unjustly imposing upon them, gather together, speak out, and demand these mandates be dropped immediately and permanently.

Elected officials must take action to eliminate this and other residual injustices of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to pass legislation to prevent such illegal overreach in the future.

Individual citizens must express their concerns to their elected officials and to the institutions where they receive health care.

The COVID-19 catastrophe did immense damage to medical care, much of it the result of gross mismanagement at the highest levels of the industry. Those just entering it must be treated with renewed respect and consideration if they are to correct the mistakes of their predecessors. Ending this injustice is an excellent place to start.

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* Note: As of a few days ago, we are down to 51 colleges still requiring students to take COVID-19 vaccines.

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Clayton J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018, he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

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