Ivy League schools are still refusing to teach in-person students who are not up-to-date on their Covid vaccines – in a move slammed as “nonsensical” and “unscientific”.
Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Pennsylvania have the strictest mandates that make having the new bivalent booster a condition of admission.
This means that students in those schools who have already received four of the old shots still need to get the new shot to continue their studies.
The rest of the Ivy League universities require at least two shots of Covid, with some also requiring a booster. Several experts told DailyMail.com that the mandate “makes no sense” now that evidence shows vaccines do not prevent large-scale transmission.
It comes as the US continues to mandate the Covid vaccine for foreigners visiting from other countries. It is the only country in the West to still do so.
There is little evidence that they have ever stopped transmission, although the shots are very effective at preventing serious illness and death.
Dr. Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told DailyMail.com: “People who benefit from boosters, as has been shown by studies conducted by the CDC and in the United Kingdom, they are in four groups: people who are elderly, people who have many comorbidities, and people who are immune compromised, and women who are pregnant.
“But healthy young people, like most people who attend Harvard [and other universities], do not fall into those groups. What a vaccine provides is short-term immunity against mild disease, and I just don’t see it as a viable public health strategy.
He added that most hospitals do not even require a bivalent booster for staff or visitors, despite the fact that “hospitals care for vulnerable patients, many of whom cannot be successfully vaccinated” .
Bob Moffit, a senior researcher at the center for health and welfare policy studies at the right-wing think-tank Heritage Foundation, told DailyMail.com “there is no scientific justification for Harvard or any other university to coerce young people and healthy women.to get a covid vaccine.
He said: “The data is shocking: the young and healthy faced an extremely low risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death from Covid-19.
“The vaccine does, in fact, carry a small risk, especially for young males, of myocarditis.
“Whenever there is a personal risk from a medical intervention, including a vaccine, the ethical imperative is personal choice, not institutional coercion.”
Dr. Monica Gandhi, medical director of San Francisco General Hospital’s HIV Clinic, Ward 86, told DailyMail.com that she has not seen “any evidence to send the bivalent booster to students at universities like Harvard, since they are usually young.”
She added: “The school[s] can no longer send the bivalent vaccine for the benefit of the prevention of transmission.
“There is a lot of population-level immunity in the United States at this point and vaccination mandates don’t make sense at this stage of the pandemic.”
Private companies and places in the United States are still able to enforce vaccination mandates, such as hospitals, as well as state employees in some areas.
The requirements of Ivy League universities are even if students have had Covid, despite studies showing that natural immunity provides significant protection.
Dr. Anna Durbin, director of the Center for Immunization Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told DailyMail.com: “We know that vaccines cannot reduce transmission for more than a few months and that Covid severe is rarely seen in young individuals.
“It is not clear what effect the booster dose will have in this population in terms of disease reduction.”
Made by Moderna and Pfizer, the bivalent (or updated) booster dose has become available in the United States since September of last year.
Updated vaccines have been announced as capable of enhancing protection against the Omicron subvariants that have become dominant worldwide.
But a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released in January suggested that most Americans who receive their bivalent booster vaccine are not protected from falling ill with Covid. .
It found that the updated shots were only 48 percent effective at stopping symptomatic infection caused by the XBB.1.5 subvariant, the currently dominant variant, for up to three months.
The CDC has highlighted that the main purpose of vaccines is to prevent hospitalization and death rather than transmission, and they are still expected to give high protection against severe diseases.
But the results mean that the two-pronged shots — which the US government paid $5 billion for last fall — aren’t missing. The World Health Organization’s 50 percent effectiveness threshold for an effective vaccine.
According to CDC dataso only 16 percent of the US population received the updated Covid booster shot.
Harvard’s vaccination requirement policy, updated as of February 2023, states: “Harvard requires the new bivalent Covid-19 booster for all eligible students with an on-campus presence.”
Students must demonstrate that they are up to date with all Harvard vaccination requirements via the Harvard patient portal before they can register for classes.
Exceptions will only be provided for medical or religious reasons, the university said.
Meanwhile, Harvard “strongly recommends” that its employees with a presence on campus receive the booster, and current staff no longer need to prove their vaccination status.
New employees must provide evidence that they have had their primary series of Covid shots.
Likewise, Yale only requires its students and not professors to get the bivalent shot.
Columbia University mandates are more universal, requiring all staff and students to have their primary series plus all boosters when they are eligible.
If the students are not caught and cannot provide an exemption, they will not be able to attend classes in person, or even study at the university.
Early last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that young men who had received the mRNA vaccines – both the Pfizer and the Moderna shot have an increased risk of suffering from heart inflammation.
The agency warned that myocarditis appears more frequently in males 16 years and older within seven days of receiving the shot.