Western’s vaccine mandate isn’t about safety – it’s about curating students
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My own city of London, Ontario will be home to an interesting experiment this coming year.
The city’s two post-secondary schools – Western University and Fanshawe College – have taken drastically different approaches to Covid. Fanshawe has done away with vaccine mandates and mandatory masking. Western is requiring masks in classrooms and is making booster shots mandatory for any on-campus students or staff.
If you don’t have three doses (for now) of a Covid vaccine, you can’t go to Western.
It’s not clear how many students this will affect: booster uptake for 18-29 year olds is at just over 36 per cent, even lower on the younger end of that range. Some students have already withdrawn and demanded refunds.
It’s an egregious, unconscionable mandate with no relationship to the “science” that’s supposed to be guiding us through Covid like the North Star.
Even those who might support the mandate should be able to agree that it’s a bad faith move to announce it only two weeks before classes start (and one week after students had to pay tuition).
Western is also applying the policy even to students taking online courses if those courses have any in-person component at all – even, as most do, a final exam. I struggle to find the safety argument for needing three jabs to sit in a socially distanced exam room for three hours next April.
But “safety” is still Western’s excuse.
“This decision supports the safety of our students, employees and our community with the goal of preserving our in-person experience,” said the obsequious Dr. Sonya Malone, Western’s occupational health physician.
In its vaccine policy, Western says the Middlesex-London Health Unit “continues to recommend that everyone receive all recommended doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.” Curiously, Fanshawe said when it announced it was dropping its vaccine mandate that the decision was “based on current advice from the Middlesex-London Health Unit.” The health unit’s medical officer of health, Dr. Alex Summers, told me that Western and Fanshawe have been advised to “to use the tools and resources available to them to address COVID-19-related concerns, as they prepare for students to return to their studies.”
“This includes assessing their own unique circumstances and risk factors, including their particular population, and employing strategies from this toolbox to meet the challenges of those situations,” he said, which to me looks like Western and Fanshawe were given a Rorschach test from which they could draw whatever conclusions they wanted.
Jill Dunlop’s office has just been hitting delete on my emails this week. Dunlop is the Ontario minister responsible for universities, so you’d think she might have something to say about a university within her mandate dropping a vaccine mandate on its students two weeks before classes start. No such luck.
The University of Waterloo, which is about an hour east of Western’s campus, felt safe enough to drop its mask and vaccine mandate for the coming year. As did the University of Windsor, two hours west of Western. Even Brescia College, Western’s affiliated women’s college, is only “strongly encouraging” – not requiring – compliance with Western’s booster mandate.
Western’s mask policy also defies reason. The school only requires masks in classrooms, but not in hallways or common areas. When students are quietly seated at their desks, they must be masked. When they’re socializing outside the classroom, no masks are necessary. I’m not complaining about this, but let’s dispense with the idea that basic logic, let alone science, supports this policy.
We know vaccination doesn’t prevent transmission. With youth, the risks of the vaccine generally outweigh the risks of Covid.
Dr. Matt Strauss, the acting medical officer of health for the nearby Haldimand-Norfolk Health Unit, pointed out this morning that booster efficacy is at roughly zero per cent after four months.
Dr. Strauss raises the critical question: if science isn’t driving this mandate, what is?
Western knows its vaccine mandate won’t protect students. The university just doesn’t want the type of people the vaccine mandate excludes to be its students.
I was struck by something Jen Gerson wrote in The Line a couple of weeks ago about Indigo’s decision not to carry my book on its shelves.
It has curated not only its product, but its customer base, serving an ever-narrower audience the product that aligns with its values and self perceptions. Thus ensuring that we shop, socialize, and inform ourselves in ever smaller bubbles of mutual amity, defining ourselves by our shared and common enmities.
In Indigo’s case, it was turning down customers because they weren’t the “right” kind of customer. I have little doubt Western is doing the same.
This fits with the place masks have taken in the post-pandemic age. Some people may believe masks may allow oxygen to pass through but not aerosolized viral particles, or that masks are necessary when standing at restaurants but not when sitting. In truth, a mask’s greatest function by now is to tell everyone around you, “I’m taking this seriously unlike you neanderthal rubes.”
Classrooms full of triple-dosed, fully-masked students don’t make Western a safer place, but they project an image of compliance and homogeneity, which the university has decided to cherish above individual choice and autonomy.
I dug into the archives and found Western’s 1989 policy on academic freedom – which is still in place.
…students are expected, particularly in their senior years, to critically appraise material, to draw their own conclusions, and to argue rationally in their defense.
Except when it comes to vaccination, that is.
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Another reason for smart, motivated young people who are proactive about their health to not go to university - do you really want bureaucrats forcing you to get medical procedures? It's a big world out there, folks. Life is too short to comply with bureaucratic weasels at Western (who could make it even shorter ...). My wife graduated from Western - I would be furious is this were happening back then. I hope many students are now.
This is excellently written and hits the mail on the head! We are dealing with the notorious “group-think” when it comes to any institution requiring mass compliance. The mandates are political science, not medical science, and that has been proven time and time again!