Students present low risk of sickness and death, vax requirements open clear-cut legal challenges

Los Angeles, CA – America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) today released their latest Issue Brief, “Residential Colleges and Mandatory Vaccination Policies: Failing the Young,” which explores the growing number of higher education institutions that plan to require proof of vaccination for COVID-19 in the fall 2021 semester. The Issue Brief is available here.

Ever since Rutgers University became the first postsecondary school to require vaccination in late March, over a dozen more colleges and universities have followed with their own mandates. AFLDS opposes attempts by public and private postsecondary institutions requiring students seeking in-person learning or campus housing to first receive a COVID-19 inoculation. Proposed mandates at colleges and universities also ignore the unlicensed “investigational” or experimental status of the three vaccines currently authorized for emergency use in the United States. Experimental treatments and biological agents cannot be mandated. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), serious illness and death are exceedingly rare among younger coronavirus patients with no underlying conditions. CDC-tracked survival rates among the 0-19 as well as 20-49-year-old cohorts, even before therapeutics became widely available, were over 99%. In addition, anecdotal reports about infection spikes on campus spreading into the surrounding community have not been definitively proven.

“The mandatory vaccination of American college students is both medically unnecessary and legally baseless,” said AFLDS. “Add to this the practical limitations presented by matriculating international students who may be vaccinated with AstraZeneca or a viral-vector injection not yet approved here, or part-time students taking night classes and working during the day who may not have time to schedule a vaccination appointment, and the potential for discrimination-based court challenges is sky-high. Our Issue Brief provides concerned students and their parents with the background on religious-medical exemptions and legal remedies they need. Know your rights.”

Read the new AFLDS Issue Brief, “Residential Colleges and Mandatory Vaccination Policies: Failing the Young,” on their website.

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