NEWS

U-M community reacts to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for students in on-campus housing

JUSTIN O’BEIRNE, LIZ HWANG & ISABELLE REGENT Daily Staff Reporters

University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel announced on Apr. 23 that any students who decide to live in on-campus housing for the 2021-2022 school year must be fully vaccinated to be eligible for housing. Students planning to live in the residence halls must provide proof of vaccination by July 15, barring limited exemptions that have not yet been laid out.

A large contingent of higher education institutions have set forth vaccination requirements for their students, while other universities and colleges are reluctant to mandate vaccines due to legal and ethical reasons.

In an email to The Michigan Daily, Dr. Robert Ernst, Associate Vice President for Student Life and Executive Director of the University Health Service, wrote that the University will accept COVID-19 vaccinations that are approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration or the World Health Organization. The accepted vaccines currently include the Pfizer BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, and AstraZeneca (Covishield) vaccines.

The University recommends that all students, regardless of living location, upload proof of their COVID19 vaccination to Wolverine Access before the beginning of the fall semester. Ernst said this information will be used to inform plans for the fall.

Ernst said that Michigan Housing is working on a specific plan for how exemptions will be managed and will share this information soon. Students who are vaccinated will not be required to adhere to on-campus testing requirements in the fall semester.

“This (vaccine) information will be used to protect our community in many ways, including waived testing and quarantine requirements, social distancing needs, public healthinformed housing decisions and administrative planning,” Ernst said.

Professor Emeritus Peter Jacobson, professor of health law and policy, said that although the vaccines did not go through the normal three-phase process of approval, they are still safe and effective.

“Nothing is perfect, but just think of it this way: a little over a year ago, the hope was that in two years, we would have a vaccine that might be effective at the 50% level,” Jacobson said. “We now have, in one year, a vaccine that’s effective in the 95% level.”

Regardless of the public concern, Jacobson said the vaccine mandate at the University will protect the overall community as long as the University gives students and staff of different socioeconomic backgrounds equal access to the vaccine. Jacobson said he is a firm believer in vaccinating everyone, with the exception of certain students and staff due to medical reasons.

“You’re in a small community,” Jacobson said. “You’re in dorms, you’re in classes, you’re exposing professors. You’re exposing U-M staff. It seems to me that the University has every right to protect itself.”

Some critics argue that vaccine mandates are a violation of the Nuremberg code, which was created after World War II to

protect people from non-consensual experimentation. Jacobson said the vaccines are not experimental because there is concrete evidence the vaccines are not harmful to human beings.

“How do you then have so few side effects after millions of doses — after a hundred million doses — in the U.S., two hundred million shots in the U.S.?” Jacobson said.

J. Scott Roberts, professor of health behavior and health education, said each university should set policies according to the needs of their specific community. One example of this, according to Roberts, is the execution of soft mandates, where colleges set consequences for students and staff who do not get vaccinated, such as increased testing and mask wearing.

“Given the politicized environment we’re in, there is this threat of backlash and I think before we go there, we should consider there’s a lot of options on a continuum here,” Roberts said.

Additionally, Roberts said, clear and early communication to all campus community members is vital to the peaceful enforcement of vaccine requirements on the U-M campus.

“Historically, there was great trust in government public health, and even reasonable trust in the pharmaceutical industry not so long ago, but you think both of those actors have suffered from a loss of public trust,” Roberts said.

International Students

Even if international students arriving on campus in the fall are unable to get vaccinated in their home country, Ernst said the University will provide easy access to vaccination. The University has partnered with Michigan Medicine, the Washtenaw

County Health Department and several local pharmacies to help the campus community get vaccinated. Ernst said students who arrive on campus unvaccinated, including international students who were not able to get vaccinated before the fall, will be expected to undergo surveillance testing until they are fully vaccinated.

At the time of publication, 12.2% of people living in China have been vaccinated against COVID-19. China is using the Sinopharm vaccine, which has a lower efficacy rate than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. In 2020, there were 3,493 Chinese-born students enrolled at U-M.

TESS CROWLEY/Daily Students and staff following COVID-19 precautions in Bursley Hall.

It’s been one month since the FDA paused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine: Here’s how vaccine hesitancy has been impacted

EMILY BLUMBERG & MADELEINE BAUER Daily Staff Reporters

The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement on April 13, recommending an immediate pause on administering the Johnson and Johnson/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine “out of an abundance of caution.” The ensuing 11-day pause was a result of six reported cases in which women ranging from 18 to 48 years of age experienced severe blood clots — a new condition known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) — less than two weeks after receiving the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. By the time the vaccine had been brought to a halt, 6.8 million doses of the vaccine had already been administered in the U.S.

The J&J vaccine is one of three CDC-authorized and recommended COVID-19 vaccinations, along with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The J&J vaccine is currently only approved for those 18 and over and was reported as 66.3% effective in clinical trials at preventing COVID19 two weeks after vaccination, compared to Pfizer and Moderna, which were 95% and 94.1% effective respectively.

Despite the lower efficacy, the J&J vaccine was 100% effective in trials against hospitalizations and death from COVID-19. Unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccinations, the J&J vaccination does not need to be stored at sub-zero temperatures and is administered in one shot rather than two. The single required shot makes administration and distribution easier for communities with limited access to health resources and may be more attractive to individuals with needle anxiety or busy schedules.

Less than a week before the recommended pause of the J&J vaccine, University President Mark Schlissel sent out an email to the campus community announcing that 7,500 doses of the J&J vaccine would be available for students to receive at locations across the three University of Michigan campuses at no cost.

After the recall was announced, student appointments for the J&J vaccine were either switched to Pfizer vaccine or cancelled altogether.

On April 23, Martino Harmon, vice president of student life, announced that being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 would be required for all students living in on-campus housing for the Fall 2021 semester. The University said students are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after receiving a single dose vaccine — like J&J — or two weeks after receiving the second shot in a two-dose vaccine series.

On that same day, the FDA and CDC put out an additional statement lifting the pause on the J&J vaccine, publicly reaffirming that it is both safe and effective.

As of May 14, including the six reported cases before the pause, there have been 28 total confirmed cases of TTS — six of them males. All of them were individuals who had recently received the J&J vaccine, and three patients died as a result.

Campus community remains confident in Johnson and Johnson vaccine safety

Although there were concerns regarding the J&J vaccine’s safety after the recall, a national poll conducted by the de Beaumont Foundation reported that 76% of those surveyed were just as likely to get a COVID-19 vaccine as they were before the pause. Additionally, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that only 18% of Hispanic women, 11% of Black men and 7% of white women said the news regarding the TTS cases made them less likely to get vaccinated.

U-M students have also expressed minimal concern about the recall of J&J or campus vaccination requirements. As of May 13, Michigan Medicine had administered over 126,000 COVID-19 vaccines with no signs of slowing down.

LSA sophomore Sophie Rogoff received the J&J vaccine prior to the recall and said she has no concerns about the safety of the vaccine. She mentioned her experience with using birth control, which the FDA states has between a 0.09% and 0.3% chance of causing blood clots. The risk of developing TTS after receiving the J&J vaccine is significantly lower than the blood clots occasionally caused by birth control.

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AMIR FLEISCHMANN | CONTRACT COMMITTEE CO-CHAIR BENJAMIN DAVIS | OPINION COLUMNIST

GEO’s Fight for the Right to Boycott

On Thursday, April 22, representatives from the Graduate Employees’ Organization met with University of Michigan administrators to discuss an important campus free speech issue — the right to exercise freedom of conscience through the refusal of letters of recommendation. The discussion revealed the University’s policy for what it is: an attack on academic freedom designed not to protect students or faculty, but only to shield the University from controversy and liability.

This right has been under attack at the University of Michigan since 2018, when two instructors, in separate incidents, declined requests for recommendations from students wishing to study in Israel. Writing these letters would have gone against the academic boycott of Israel in support of Palestinian human rights, and both instructors declined them for that reason. Even though Professor John Cheney-Lippold was exercising his constitutional right to free speech, University leaders nevertheless issued severe sanctions, including the loss of his upcoming sabbatical and a denial of a merit-based raise for one year. The graduate student instructor received a formal letter of admonishment from her department chair with implied threats of dismissal from the graduate program if such behavior were to happen again. What’s more, President Schlissel and then-Provost Martin Philbert issued a public statement that denounced both instructors.

The punishment meted out to Professor Cheney-Lippold and the public statement from the most powerful University leaders was meant to warn campus faculty of the price for academic freedom, and potentially had a chilling effect on those who might otherwise speak out if they did not feel threatened. But the University wanted to make sure this wouldn’t happen again, so they convened a so-called Blue Ribbon Panel to devise a policy that would govern letters of recommendation.

The resulting policy is a strident attack on free speech. It doesn’t prohibit instructors from denying letters of recommendation for political or ethical reasons, but only from vocalizing those reasons. This did not sit well with GEO members, who voted overwhelmingly to oppose the policy in our 2020 contract negotiations. Much has been written about “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech,” which describes the way norms of freedom of expression are so often bent to exclude those who would speak out for justice in Palestine. Despite the ongoing assault on Palestinian lives and human rights, however, our problem with the University’s policy on letters of recommendation is not just about Palestine. More and more, instructors are starting to see letters of recommendation as an important site of political opposition and learning. There is a growing movement among mathematicians to refuse to write letters for privacyviolating surveillance organizations, like the National Security Agency. There is also the longstanding trend of declining recommendation requests for Teach for America applicants. We can think of a whole host of objectionable organizations — ExxonMobil, Raytheon, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s, R-Ga., congressional office — to which an instructor may want to vocally refuse to write letters of recommendation. Being able to voice the reason for denying a letter of recommendation is a critical component of any boycott, and GEO is proud to stand against this indefensible policy.

GEO ultimately won a meeting with U-M administrators to discuss the policy and how it will be implemented. The discussion left us only with a clearer sense of how poorly thought-out and difficult to implement the policy is. While U-M administrators made repeated reference to fears of discrimination as justification for the policy, they were never able to explain how Teach for America applicants could be understood as a group that could be discriminated against.

Read more at michigandaily.com

Amir Fleischmann is the Contract Committee Co-Chair at the University of Michigan’s Graduate Employees Organization and can be reached at contractchair@geo3550.org.

Let America’s educators teach science without the stigma

Ionce had an interaction with my high school physics teacher that has stuck with me ever since. During one of the weekly chats we’d have in her classroom after school, I wondered out loud why neither evolution nor the Big Bang theory were covered in the biology or physics curricula. My teacher explained to me that being in a town drenched in parochial ideology, there was a don’t ask, don’t tell policy covering the teaching of evolution. Science instructors were encouraged to not teach the subject and to only field questions when asked. While not surprising to me in light of the culture of my hometown — Ortonville, Mich. — it was infuriating to know that social pressure was pushing my science teachers to avoid evolution in their general science courses. No law was restricting them. Only the fear of becoming a social pariah was in the way of them providing students with a scientifically complete education.

What is happening in my hometown is not an anomaly in the contemporary United States. A 2019 survey reported that only 67% of public high school biology teachers present Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection as the scientific consensus. This is an increase from past surveys, but still quite low given that the theory of evolution is one of the most championed theories in all of biology. One out of every three teachers is not portraying evolution by natural selection as the robust scientific theory that it is — a theory that has been fortified with new evidence every year since it was first proposed. This presents obstacles to students who wish to further their science education at postsecondary institutions. More worrisome is that evolution denial propagates ignorance and scientific illiteracy — issues all the more pertinent in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Legal prohibitions on the public instruction of evolutionary theory do not hold anymore, but teachers’ apprehension about teaching evolution as agreed-upon science indicates that traditionalist mores still weigh down the American public education system. Bans on teaching evolution in public schools is as old as the theory itself. One of the first major conflicts between scientific educators and conservative policy makers in U.S. history was the Scopes Trial of 1925. This legal case concerned a Tennessee public school teacher who taught evolutionary theory despite a Tennessee law prohibiting instruction of human evolution in any school that received state funding. This trial catalyzed the debate between creationism and evolutionary theory. From then on, legal challenges to the instruction of evolution and natural selection in public schools have been mounted by many Christian groups — usually those from evangelical traditions — with varying degrees of success.

Now, I cannot criticize those 1920s Tennessee creationist policy makers too virulently, as at that time evolution was not a majority-held belief among Christians nor society at large. But criticism is warranted for contemporary teachers and education boards who are still reluctant to teach evolutionary theory and natural selection in light of the now 160 years of evidence — including the crucial discovery of DNA and genes — that provide robust support for evolution. And while I understand that some regions of the country have intense negative social sanctions against anti-creationist rhetoric that can be hard for teachers to overcome, it is more important that teachers plan science curriculum around empirical observations than socially-pressured traditional beliefs.

This is not to say that learning about religious practice has no room in education — just that it does not belong in scientific curriculum at the expense of silencing scientific fact. A more apt place would be in the domain of social studies, with an emphasis on the diversity of religious practice. But having evolutionary theory not presented to students within their science courses promotes widespread ignorance and scientific illiteracy, two issues detrimental if a society wishes to better itself. Denying students the knowledge that many biologists view as foundational to their discipline serves ideology much more than it serves education.

Read more at michigandaily.com