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NEW BRUNSWICK, New Jersey, March 29, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Rutgers University announced that students hoping to begin classes there in autumn 2021 must have taken an experimental COVID-19 vaccine if they wish to learn on campus, making Rutgers possibly the first college in the United States to introduce a COVID vaccine mandate.
In a letter released Thursday, the president of the university, Jonathan Holloway, along with two other senior management figures demanded that “all students planning to attend in the Fall 2021 semester must be fully vaccinated.”
Although the university maintains that “(b)road immunization is critical to help stop the current pandemic and to protect our University community,” they have admitted there are a few, limited exceptions to the rule: those who object “for medical or religious reasons,” and anyone studying remotely.
Rutgers informed students of privileges exclusively to those who receive one of the jabs, forcing anyone who does not get injected to forgo the normal university experience.
An “expedited return to pre-pandemic normal” is promised, along with “additional face-to-face course offerings and academic experiences, opportunities for a wider range of events and activities offered at our campuses, expanded dining and recreation options at Rutgers, greater interpersonal collaboration among faculty, students, and researchers.”
On the other hand, even after being vaccinated, the school will still require students to participate in a gruelling testing program, consisting in taking an invasive PCR test (the effectiveness of which is highly disputed) every week, in addition to wearing a face mask and maintaining physical distancing measures.
The university will be policing the vaccine requirement by seeking proof of vaccination before students arrive on campus.
As things stand, the vaccine mandate does not extend to staff and faculty members, who are able to remain employed by Rutgers without being vaccinated at this time. Instead, staff are strongly urged by the university “to get immunized against COVID-19 at the earliest opportunity.”
Whether or not employers can legally require their employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 remains a contentious topic. The currently available jabs against the virus have all been approved under “emergency use authorization” (EUA) by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), meaning the three experimental shots are still in trial phases and have not qualified for licensing from the FDA.
The FDA states that as EUA products, each vaccine is “an investigational vaccine not licensed for any indication” and the agency requires that all “promotional material relating to the COVID-19 Vaccine clearly and conspicuously … state that this product has not been approved or licensed by the FDA, but has been authorized for emergency use by FDA.”
Federal law states, “to protect public health,” that all manufacturers of products authorized for emergency use are required to provide “(a)ppropriate conditions designed to ensure that individuals to whom the product is administered are informed … of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product, of the consequences, if any, of refusing administration of the product, and of the alternatives to the product that are available and of their benefits and risks.”
It seems, then, that while the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are under investigation by the FDA, pending licensing, it may not be licit to be required to take the jab.
The FDA, in a 2017 document on guidance related to EUAs, stated that recipients of EUA products “have the option to accept or refuse the EUA product and of any consequences of refusing administration of the product,” caveating that the President of the United States may waive this regulation for members of the armed forces “under certain circumstances.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in August also stated that COVID-19 vaccines “are not allowed to be mandatory.”
Furthermore, the Nuremberg Code of 1947, regarding medical experimentation, states that the “voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” On account of this, attorney Anna Garner, who is currently representing corrections officer Isaac Legaretta in the country’s first legal challenge against COVID-19 vaccine mandates, said that “experimenting on humans” with COVID jabs is “a crime against humanity.”
According to the Rutgers President's statement, vaccination with one of either the Pfizer, Moderna, or the more recently introduced Johnson & Johnson experimental COVID shots will protect the individual against “serious illness, hospitalization, and death from the virus.”
However, contrary to Holloway’s assertion, doubts about the effectiveness and, indeed, the safety of the vaccines have been raised by numerous scientists working in the field of immunology.
As early as November 2020, Dr. Mike Yeadon, the former vice president and chief scientist at Pfizer, flatly rejected any need to vaccinate the population against COVID-19.
Writing for Britain’s Lockdown Sceptics, Yeadon said there was “absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic … you do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease.” “You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on humans,” he said.
In fact, mounting evidence suggests that COVID-19-related mRNA therapy is responsible for seriously injuring vast numbers of people who have taken the jab in the hope of avoiding illness from the virus. The CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which collates self-assessed reports from individuals who record side effects after getting a vaccine, displays some 44,606 reports of injury after use of Pfizer and Moderna’s jabs.
The latest data on the system, taken from December 14, 2020, up to March 19, 2021, shows 2,050 deaths have been recorded. A further 826 recordings of permanent disabilities were submitted after taking the shots and 4,442 hospitalizations.