Elite Universities and the Impending Booster Regime

Why I started a petition to revoke the University of Pennsylvania's booster shot mandate

University of Pennsylvania campus, Philadelphia, PA. Image by Shutterstock.

Since Harvard University’s sudden lockdown in March 2020, elite universities have set the tone for COVID-19 policy. Many of the the nation’s most prestigious educational institutions have now imposed sweeping booster mandates on their campuses. If history is any guide, what at first seems like an overly cautious decision taken by a handful of colleges and universities could soon turn into the norm for everyone else. For this reason, the booster mandates recently announced by many of America’s top universities are of concern not only to their students, staff, and faculty, but also to the public as a whole.

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania where booster shots were mandated in late December in response to the advent of the Omicron variant. I got the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine in the summer of 2021 after several of my friends in India became very sick from the Delta variant. Though I am healthy and in my 20s, I believed that the vaccine was the best option at that time given the possibility of severe respiratory illness caused by the Delta variant and because I was visiting older relatives for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic.

Fast-forward to Omicron. It is now well-known that this new variant is significantly milder than Delta. It also infects unvaccinated, vaccinated, and boosted individuals alike. What’s more, anyone with an Omicron infection can transmit the virus to others regardless of vaccination status. Despite these now undeniable facts, the University of Pennsylvania decided to mandate booster shots for everyone on campus precisely at the moment when the purported moral justification for the booster—stopping the transmission of the virus—had totally collapsed. I study ethnomusicology, not virology, but the widely available data on the booster’s inability to stop the spread of COVID-19, coupled with the now well-documented risks of vaccine-induced heart inflammation for men in my age group, led me to start a petition to revoke UPenn’s booster shot mandate.  

My petition was inspired by similar letters at universities like Stanford and Cornell and rapidly gained attention from experts like Dr. Vinay Prasad, Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. In relation to the petition, Dr. Prasad observed that eminent virologist and vaccine maker, the University of Pennsylvania’s own Dr. Paul Offit, should not be taken lightly when he told The Atlantic that he would not recommend a booster for his own college-age son. The fact that Penn flouts the guidance of one of its most accomplished and visible vaccine experts demonstrates just how divorced elite university bureaucracy has become from the realities of scientific research and public health.

The petition calls on the University of Pennsylvania to take its own motto—”laws without morals are useless”—seriously and consider in good faith the calls of students like myself to rescind these mandates. Not only do the booster mandates put students, faculty, and staff’s right to informed consent and bodily autonomy in jeopardy, they also threaten the core values of a liberal education; namely, the value that truth, not profit or political gain, should be the goal of a true education. When bureaucrats decree draconian mandates as the default response to hotly contested scientific debate and morally weighty public health issues, what does this tell us about the state of ideas more broadly at the country’s ostensibly top universities?

Students should not be coerced to take experimental vaccines under the veiled threat of exclusion from the classroom, research facilities, housing and, ultimately, expulsion from the university itself. Such an ultimatum induces docility, fear, and apathy among students, all qualities that impinge upon their ability to learn and contribute creatively to the intellectual life of the university and society. Like the deleterious effects of implementing extended lockdowns and masking schoolchildren, the consequences of booster mandates will stretch far beyond the immediate pandemic context.

This issue affects many more people than college students, graduate researchers, and professors. These mandates also apply to college and university employees—cafeteria workers, janitors, maintenance technicians, and others—who are told to get the booster or risk termination. While boosters ought to be available to front line workers who want them, to mandate the jab or fire the worker is an act of repression against the working class. This bitter reality is understood by labor unions and progressive politicians abroad yet ignored by university administrations in the United States. Booster mandates are just as much a labor issue as they are a bioethical one.

The most concerning potential effect of Penn’s booster mandate is related to the disproportionate role Ivy League and other elite universities play in determining the discourse and policy in response to the pandemic. In this trickle-down arrangement, university bureaucrats craft the policies, test them on campus, and soon enough those very same policies are expanded to the rest of society. Many major cities, including Philadelphia, have already implemented vaccine mandates simply to eat at a restaurant. Without concerted resistance, a universal booster mandate is likely next in line for anyone who wants to sit down for a cup of coffee or listen to live music in the city.

What is the endgame of this booster regime? How many boosters will it take by the end of 2022 to be “fully vaccinated” if the efficacy of the shot drops to around 45% after just 10 weeks? When we should be celebrating the arrival of the Omicron variant as a harbinger of the pandemic’s inevitable transformation to endemic status, universities like Penn are using this variant as further grist for their mandate mill. What’s more, they do not even feel the need to include evidence in their mandate announcements, let alone honestly present the risks associated with the vaccine. This sets a poor example of intellectual integrity for their students and diminishes the moral legitimacy of the university in the eyes of the public it serves.

The struggle to defeat booster mandates on college campuses is about much more than vaccines. It is about the pursuit of truth in America’s colleges and universities, which has been all but abandoned in favor of a blind allegiance to the dictates of the two biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic: Big Pharma and Big Tech. If the last two years are any indication, booster mandates at universities like Penn will soon be applied much more broadly. The sooner we are honest about this sorry state of affairs, the sooner we can unite to change it.