Booster Mandates May Have Unnecessarily Hurt Millions Of College Students

It’s hard to believe we’re still talking about COVID vaccine mandates in 2024, but given how resistant authority figures are to accepting defeat or acknowledging mistakes, it seems likely we’ll be talking about them forever.

Dozens of colleges continue to enforce vaccine and booster mandates on students, refusing to accept, in the face of all available evidence and data, that there is no external health benefit whatsoever to forcing 18-year-olds to get a vaccine with minimal, transient benefits and potentially harmful side effects.

This is made even more frustrating by the fact that the former director of the FDA recently admitted that the COVID vaccine approvals process that gave colleges and universities license to unnecessarily force mandates onto young people was catastrophically and fatally flawed.

Now a few researchers have turned their efforts towards putting some conclusive data towards uncovering just how damaging and harmful these mandates have been for young college students.

And it’s not good news.

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 25:  National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci arrives at an event commemorating the 50 millionth COVID-19 vaccine shot on February 25, 2021 at the South Court Auditorium of Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC.  (Photo by Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images)

COVID Booster Mandates Were Completely Unnecessary

The results from this study are jaw dropping; both for the harms caused by booster mandates, and how utterly meaningless those mandates are to preventing any negative outcomes from COVID.

As they explain, thousands, if not millions of college students risked having their lives and educations upended if they refused to comply with COVID booster mandates. To risk the possible futures of their students, colleges and universities must have had clearcut evidence that such mandates were necessary, effective, and justifiable given the epidemiological circumstances.

That evidence did not exist.

The underlying assumption of booster mandates is that a mass wave of hospitalizations and serious COVID-caused health issues would occur if students weren’t forced to stay "up to date" with their vaccinations. Another assumption was that immunity from previous infection was effectively nonexistent.

As this study shows, both assumptions were wildly, unimaginably wrong.

Based on an examination of booster efficacy, specifically among the 18-29 age group that make up the overwhelming majority of college and university students, they estimated that 22,000-30,000 young adults must be boosted to prevent one COVID-19 associated hospitalization.

And even that’s an overstatement. It’s 22,000-30,000 uninfected adults.

Given the prevalence of infection-acquired immunity, especially among young people, by the time booster mandates came into effect in late 2021-early 2022, it’s likely that schools with large enrollments in the 20,000-25,000 range may not have prevented a single COVID hospitalization with booster mandates.

Not one.

Assuming 70% of students had already contracted COVID by 2022; an easily achievable number considering seroprevalence estimates at that time, a school with 20,000 students would also have had 14,000 with natural immunity. Meaning that at the higher end of the study’s estimates, you’d have to look through five major universities with booster mandates before finding a single avoided COVID hospitalization.

This potentially life-changing policy, affecting millions of students and their futures, was almost entirely meaningless. And that’s only telling half the story.

‘Net Expected Harm’

Beyond the uselessness in terms of reducing hospitalizations, the researchers also found that there was likely a "net expected harm" from mandates thanks to the often-ignored vaccine side effects.

"Using CDC and sponsor-reported adverse event data, we find that booster mandates may cause a net expected harm: per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, we anticipate 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity which interferes with daily activities."

Effectively, for every 22,000-30,000 students subjected to booster mandates, there could be as many as nearly 100 serious adverse events. And one prevented hospitalization.

Not to mention quite literally *thousands* of side effects that could interfere with "daily activities."

So in order to possibly prevent one hospitalization among tens of thousands of students, colleges and universities essentially subjected young adults, especially men, to a risk of serious adverse effects that was 18x to 98x higher.

If you’re wondering how that makes any sense, it doesn’t. And again, these risk-benefit ratios don’t even factor in the prevalence of natural immunity among young people. As the researchers point out, this obvious, but purposefully ignored, reality makes this policy even more inexcusable.

"Given the high prevalence of post-infection immunity, this risk-benefit profile is even less favorable," they write. That makes the entire policy "unethical" meaning that those impacted by it are more likely to be harmed by the intervention than helped.

"University booster mandates are unethical because: 1) no formal risk-benefit assessment exists for this age group; 2) vaccine mandates may result in a net expected harm to individual young people; 3) mandates are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given the modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission; 4) US mandates violate the reciprocity principle because rare serious vaccine-related harms will not be reliably compensated due to gaps in current vaccine injury schemes; and 5) mandates create wider social harms."

Quite literally, there is a "net expected harm" for individual young people that were coerced into getting boosted or see their educational careers destroyed or futures derailed.

The very "experts" and administrators who admonished critics with endless appeals to authority, claiming that they were "following the science" while detractors were "anti-science" extremists, likely caused a net harm to thousands, if not millions of their students.

Booster mandates were unnecessary, unethical and harmful, with vanishingly small benefits and massive increases in risk. Many schools have quietly dropped their policies and mandates without acknowledging the harm they caused. But that doesn’t make it any less real, or any less inexcusable.

The actual science said they were wrong. Yet as has been so often the case during COVID policy debates, the actual science took a back seat to panic, fear, malicious coercion and inexcusable ignorance.