Author Topic: College Vaccine Booster Mandates Don't Make Any Medical or Ethical Sense, New Study Concludes  (Read 354 times)

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Offline Kamaji

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College Vaccine Booster Mandates Don't Make Any Medical or Ethical Sense, New Study Concludes

College students should be able to use their own judgment on COVID boosters, not be forced into them by learning institutions.

BRIAN DOHERTY
12.8.2022

Around 300 American colleges and universities, according to the website Best Colleges, mandate that students receive some form of a COVID vaccine booster. According to a new study from the Journal of Medical Ethics, whether thinking of the mandates as a matter of overall societal health or ethics, those particular vaccine mandates likely shouldn't exist.

Authors Kevin Bardosh, Allison Krug, Euzebiusz Jamrozik, Trudo Lemmens, Salmaan Keshavjee, Vinay Prasad, Marty A. Makary, Stefan Baral, and Tracy Beth Høeg (from a wide range of academic and medical institutions, but characterized in the paper as a "team of bioethicists, epidemiologists, legal scholars and clinicians") looked at the best available medical study data related to people ages 18 through 29—which covers the vast majority of college students—regarding the danger of COVID infection in 2022 and the dangers boosters may present to that age group.

After calculations whose specifics and citations are given in the full paper, the researchers estimate that in order to prevent one COVID hospitalization over a 6-month period, approximately 31,000 to 42,000 adults in that age group would have to get a third mRNA booster; and that if that many people from that age group get that booster, given the best available knowledge and estimates on how frequently that booster is likely to cause adverse effects, those boosters will generate over 18 "serious adverse events" (SAEs) for that single prevented hospitalization.

Those adverse events would include in that sized group 1.5–4.6 "booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation)" and 1,430 to 4,626 booster-associated health complications that would "interfer[e] with daily activities" but "typically not requir[e] hospitalisation."

The authors' analysis is rooted in propositions they insist should not be controversial any longer given actual evidence: that the latest vaccines "provide, at most, partial and transient protection against infection, which decreases precipitously after a few months" and that, quoting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "anyone with Omicron infection, regardless of vaccination status or whether or not they have symptoms, can spread the virus to others." They also stress the often unnoted benefits of previous infection for immunity in COVID policy making.

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Source:  https://reason.com/2022/12/08/college-vaccine-booster-mandates-dont-make-any-medical-or-ethical-sense-new-study-concludes/