Harvard University requires up to FIVE Covid injections for in-person classes

Ivy League schools are still refusing to teach students in person who are not up to date on their Covid vaccinations, in a move criticized as “nonsense” and “unscientific”.

Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Pennsylvania have the strictest mandates that make having the new bivalent booster a condition of entry.

This means that students in those schools who have already received four of the previous vaccines will still need to receive the new vaccine to continue their studies.

The rest of the Ivy League colleges require at least two Covid shots, with some also requiring a booster. Multiple experts told DailyMail.com the mandate “doesn’t make sense” now that evidence shows vaccines do not prevent large-scale transmission.

It comes as the US continues to require the Covid vaccine for foreigners visiting from other countries. It is the only country in the world that still does it.

There is little evidence that the mandates have ever stopped transmission, although the injections are highly effective in preventing serious illness and death.

Dr Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told DailyMail.com: “People who benefit from boosters, as shown by studies by the CDC and in the UK, They are divided into four groups: older people, people who have multiple comorbidities, immunocompromised people, and pregnant women.

“But healthy young people, like most people who attend Harvard (and other universities), don’t fall into those groups. What a vaccine will provide is short-lived immunity against mild diseases, and I don’t see that as a viable public health strategy.”

He added that most hospitals don’t even require a bivalent booster for staff or visitors, even though “hospitals care for vulnerable patients, many of whom cannot be successfully vaccinated.”

Bob Moffit, a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation’s center for health and wellness policy studies, told DailyMail.com that “there is no scientific justification for Harvard or any other university coercing healthy young men and women into get a covid vaccine.

He said: ‘The data is overwhelming: young, healthy people have faced extremely low risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death from Covid-19.

“The vaccine does, in fact, carry a small risk of myocarditis, particularly for young men.

“Whenever there is personal risk from a medical intervention, including a vaccine, the ethical imperative is personal choice, not institutional coercion.”

Dr. Monica Gandhi, medical director of the HIV Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, Ward 86, told DailyMail.com that she saw “no evidence to order the bivalent booster for students at universities like Harvard since they are generally young “.

She added: ‘The school(s) can no longer require the bivalent vaccine for the benefit of preventing transmission.

“There’s a lot of population-level immunity in the US right now and vaccination mandates don’t make sense at this phase of the pandemic.”

Private companies and places in the US can still enforce vaccine mandates, such as hospitals, as can state employees in some areas.

Ivy League college requirements hold even if students have had Covid, despite studies suggesting natural immunity provides significant protection.

Dr Anna Durbin, director of the Center for Immunization Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told DailyMail.com: “We know that vaccines may not reduce transmission for more than a few months and that severe covid is rarely seen in the very young.” individuals

“It is not clear what effect the booster dose will have in this population in terms of reducing disease.”

Made by Moderna and Pfizer, the bivalent (or updated) booster dose became available in the US starting in September of last year.

The updated vaccines were heralded as being able to increase protection against the Omicron subvariants that have become dominant in the world.

But a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released in January suggested that most Americans who get their bivalent booster shot are not protected against covid disease.

It found that the updated injections were only 48 percent effective in stopping symptomatic infection caused by the XBB.1.5 subvariant, the currently dominant variant, for up to three months.

The CDC stressed that the primary goal of vaccines is to prevent hospitalization and death rather than transmission, and they are still expected to provide high protection against serious disease.

But the findings mean that bivalent injections, for which the US government paid $5 billion last fall, fall short of the World Health Organization 50 percent efficacy threshold for an effective vaccine.

According to data from the CDCso far only 16 percent of the US population has received the updated Covid booster shot.

Harvard’s vaccine requirements policy, updated February 2023, states: ‘Harvard requires the new Covid-19 bivalent booster for all eligible students with a campus presence.’

Students must demonstrate that they are up to date with all Harvard immunization requirements through the Harvard Patient Portal before they can register for classes.

Exceptions will be provided only for medical or religious reasons, the university said.

Meanwhile, Harvard “strongly recommends” that its employees with a campus presence receive the booster, and current staff no longer need to prove their vaccination status.

New employees must provide evidence that they have received their primary series of Covid vaccinations.

Similarly, Yale only requires its students and not its teachers to receive the bivalent injection.

Columbia University’s mandates are more universal, requiring all staff and students to have their primary series plus all boosters when eligible.

If students do not receive a puncture and cannot provide a waiver, they will not be able to attend classes in person, or even study at the university.

Early last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that young men who had received the mRNA vaccines, either the Pfizer or Moderna shot, were at increased risk of heart inflammation.

The agency warned that myocarditis occurred most often in men over the age of 16 within seven days of receiving the injection.