University Mandatory Vaccination Requirement Challenged; Ruling Could Stymie Plans for Returning Students at Many Colleges
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Mandatory Vaccination Policy
WASHINGTON D.C. (April 23, 2021) - With many universities - including at least three in the D.C. area alone - planning to return students to campus this fall, and counting on requirements that students (and possibly also faculty and staff) first be vaccinated for COVID-19, a formal challenge to the legality of such requirements is being lodged at Rutgers University.
A court ruling that such requirements are illegal - especially for vaccines which have been approved by the FDA only for emergency use - could stymie plans at many other colleges and universities, and either increase the number of students who will become afflicted by COVID-19 and/or slash the number of in-person classes and the number of students who can be accommodated in dormitories, suggests public interest law professor John Banzhaf.
A legal demand that it rescind its mandatory vaccination policy for students was served on Rutgers. It charged that the mandate “violates federal law, international laws, civil and individual rights, and public policy.”
More specifically it argued that it was illegal to require students to have vaccinations that have obtained only emergency-use authorization from the federal FDA, and have not been fully approved.
Receiving An Education Or Receiving An Experimental Treatment
“Rutgers is effectively forcing each student to choose between receiving an education or receiving an experimental medical treatment to which they do not consent,” it said.
The right to informed medical consent, the lawyers wrote, is “considered a fundamental, overriding principle of medical ethics.”
Rutgers’s policy, they said, would also violate its contractual obligations as a state-approved vaccine-distribution center.
So far more than two dozen institutions of higher educations have announced that they will require students returning in the fall to have received vaccinations.
These include Johns Hopkins, George Washington, Georgetown, Trinity Washington, American, Columbia, Ithaca, Cornell, St. John's, Syracuse, Emory, Clark Atlanta, Yale, Morehouse College and its School of Medicine, Spelman, College of the Atlantic in Maine, Grinnell, Seattle, Vassar, Manhattanville, and Fairleigh Dickinson.
Vaccinations Before Engaging In Certain Activities
Professor Banzhaf and other legal scholars have argued that universities can certainly require vaccinations before students engage in certain activities in which the risks of infection are especially high.
These could include participating in contact sports, working out in a gym, singing in a choir or being near other students who are singing, living in a dorm and especially in a multi-person dormitory room, or even being in a classroom.
Requiring students who refuse to be vaccinated (and who don't have a medical or religious reason for doing so) to take their classes on line rather then in a confined classroom seems entirely reasonable, especially since many courts have held that moving classes on line during the height of the pandemic was not unreasonable or illegal, and that on-line classes were not necessarily inferior to learning in a classroom.
Many universities have yet to make - or at least not to announce - whether they will make vaccinations mandatory for the fall, and what happens with Rutgers could have a major impact on their decisions, suggests Banzhaf, who nevertheless anticipates some problems in authenticating vaccination certifications, especially from foreign countries and/or for vaccines not yet authorized for use in the U.S.
