BY: JULIA WICK, LOS ANGELES – APRIL 23, 2021
As colleges and universities across the country prepare to welcome a growing number of students back to campus in the fall, schools have been wrestling with the question of whether to mandate COVID-19 vaccines. Several dozen colleges — by no means a majority — have already announced they will require vaccination for fall enrollment.
That landscape shifted dramatically Thursday when the University of California and California State University announced Thursday that they intend to require COVID-19 vaccinations for all students, faculty and staff on campus properties. The proposed policy would go into effect once the Food and Drug Administration gives formal approval to the vaccines.
As my colleagues Nina Agrawal, Teresa Watanabe and Colleen Shalby report, the directive is the largest of its kind in U.S. higher education, affecting more than 1 million members of the two public university systems. As with other mandatory shots for measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox, the COVID-19 directive would allow for students or employees to seek an exemption based on medical or religious grounds.
Because of questions over the legality of requiring vaccines before they have been formally approved by the FDA, the timing of the mandate will depend on when at least one of the vaccines receives formal FDA approval. (The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are currently being distributed under emergency-use authorization and the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccine remains on pause.)
The two system leaders said they were making the announcement now to give students, families and employees ample time to plan their vaccinations before the fall terms begin.
Stanford, a private university, separately announced Thursday that they plan to require all undergraduate, graduate and professional students coming to campus this fall to be vaccinated for COVID-19, with allowances for medical or religious exemptions.
BY: JULIA WICK, LOS ANGELES – APRIL 23, 2021
