Should COVID-19 vaccinations be mandatory for students?

Throughout the country, schools (especially colleges and universities) are mandating that students receive COVID-19 vaccinations before they return for in-person learning. This is a terrible idea that will likely do more harm than good.

There are many reasons students should not be required to receive COVID-19 vaccinations.

First, all three COVID-19 vaccines have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

As FDA notes, “An Emergency Use Authorization is a mechanism to facilitate the availability and use of medical countermeasures, including vaccines, during public health emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. Under an EUA, FDA may allow the use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products in an emergency to diagnose, treat or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met, including that there are no adequate, approved and available alternatives.”

There is a big difference between allowing the use of unapproved vaccines and requiring them. As long as the COVID-19 vaccines are under EUA, it is patently wrong to mandate them.

Second, less than a month after FDA gave the go ahead for adolescent Americans to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, disturbing reports have surfaced of young Americans being hospitalized with heart problems.

As NBC News recently reported, “A higher-than-usual number of cases of a type of heart inflammation has been reported following COVID-19 vaccination, especially among young men following their second dose of an mRNA vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.”

Indeed, the number of young Americans experiencing heart problems after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine has caused the CDC to schedule an “emergency meeting” to look further into this troubling matter.

Unless and until this problem is fully understood, no school should mandate students receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

Third, what about students who have already contracted COVID-19 and have ample natural antibodies? Why in the world should they be forced to receive a COVID-19 vaccine?

According to a study from the Cleveland Clinic titled “Necessity of COVID-19 vaccination in previously infected individuals,” “Not one of the 1,359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARSCoV-2 infection over the duration of the study.”

Fourth, and perhaps most significant, is the fact that by and large, COVID-19 poses little threat to young people.

As of this writing, according to CDC data, 314 Americans under the age of 17 have died from COVID-19. Among Americans aged 18 to 29-years-old, 2,323 have died from COVID-19.

Moreover, data show that young people rarely transmit COVID-19. According to Pediatrics (official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics): “Children are not significant drivers of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear why documented SARS-CoV-2 transmission from children to other children or adults is so infrequent.”

So, if young people are basically invulnerable to COVID-19 and seldom spread the disease, why are schools pushing to mandate vaccines on this population?

If we have learned one lesson from the pandemic, it is that one-size-fits-all “solutions” do not work.

Fifteen months into the pandemic, it is unequivocally true that COVID-19 has an outsized effect on the elderly and those with co-morbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, etc.

For the most part, young people have been thrown under the proverbial bus throughout the pandemic. We shuttered schools, thereby retarding their educational prospects and intellectual development. We also forbade them from almost any in-person social interaction, which contributed to a huge spike in child abuse, depression and even youth suicide.

At this point in the pandemic, we know that young people have paid a monumental toll. The absolute last thing we should do is mandate an experimental vaccine that could cause long-term heart problems.

Chris Talgo