Why is Santa Clara University Still Mandating COVID Vaccines?

Santa Clara University  – a Jesuit school founded in 1851 – is requiring that all students have COVID shots if they wish to attend this fall.

And, no, they are not offering a religious exemption.

SCU is one of about 100 accredited, four-year colleges in the country that is still demanding COVID shots –  the other 96% are not.

The “vaccine” (vaccine in quotes because the shots are not in fact actual vaccines) requirement has drawn the attention – and ire – of medical professionals and advocates in California and across the country and the pressure is reportedly building on SCU to re-think its decision.

Lucia Sinatra of No College Mandates, an organization dedicated to ending such mandates nationwide said her group has learned that a number of members of the SCU Board of Trustees have relayed their deep concern about the issue to school president Julie Sullivan.

Additionally, official complaints have and are being filed with the appropriate state offices and a number of other noted experts in the field and officials are expected to add their voices to the call for SCU to drop the mandates in the coming week.

Dr. Clayton Baker, internist and former Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester, penned an open letter questioning the mandates to Sullivan and SCU medical chief Dr. Lewis Osofsky. Osofsky is a COVID hardliner who allegedly attempted to have a doctor who wrote a medical exemption for a student who suffered a severe reaction to her first shot withdraw his professional recommendation –  if accurate, a serious breach of ethics.

In the letter, Dr. Baker wrote:

There is good reason why the overwhelming majority of colleges have dropped COVID vaccine mandates. That is because there is zero legitimate clinical indication for college students to get the COVID-19 vaccine, especially at this late date. 

It is now beyond reasonable dispute that:

• Healthy, young persons have an absolutely miniscule risk of serious injury and death due to COVID

• The majority of Americans have already had COVID and/or the vaccines, and thus already possess some level of immunity

• Federal health agencies have conceded that the COVID vaccines do not effectively prevent either contraction or transmission of the virus.

Furthermore, there is a growing body of evidence that COVID vaccines can be highly toxic and even deadly to subsets of the population, by a variety of mechanisms. One particularly susceptible demographic is young adult males – thousands of whom, of course, would be put at risk via your mandates.

SCU did not respond to requests for comment. As per Globe practice, the questions they declined to answer are appended to the end of this article.

Dr. Tracy Hoeg –  epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco and one of the doctors who sued to overturn the state’s ban on doctors not being able to talk freely with their patients about covid said that not only is the mandate “unethical and coercive,” it doesn’t make any sense even if you follow Covidian logic.

The SCU mandate can be met with having either taken three jabs of the original “monovalent” shot (and its boosters) or one shot of the newer “bivalent” offering.

Hoeg said that even if the older shots worked, their theoretical protection would have worn off by now. As to the newer shots, there is not yet any proper evidence or competent study to show their effectiveness, Hoeg said.

“There is no data to back up SCU’s position,” Hoeg said. “The known potential harm more than outweighs any possible theoretical benefit.”

So why is SCU a COVID outlier?  It could be in large part due to its location – Santa Clara County, California.

If one were to make a list of places on the planet that had the most draconian responses to the pandemic, China would be at the top (welding people into apartments, for example) but Santa Clara County would probably not be too far behind.

In his piece on the war the county waged against one church (a war still going on,) writer David Zweig noted that:

From the outset, Santa Clara had an unusual fervor for enforcing its health orders, and for punishing those who didn’t comply. By one analysis, as of March 2021, the county had issued an astonishing $4.9 million in fines to nearly 400 businesses and entities for pandemic rules infractions. By comparison, six other Bay Area counties combined had collected just $82,000.

The county became a very nasty uncaring poster child for extreme lockdowns, even going so far as to make Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth wear masks in an open-air broadcasting booth in an empty stadium when they called a 49ers game.

It is possible that those hardline policies have trickled down to the university, said Sinatra, who also wrote a in-depth story on the topic for the Brownstone Institute.

Sinatra added that the decision to continue with campus mandates continues the pattern of intense “ostracization” of the students who thought that maybe the shots were not a good idea or terribly necessary.

Baker went further, saying the school is “in an outlier county with an outlier guy as their medical director.”

In California, 23 schools have similar mandates, including six CalState schools (but no UC schools) as do a number of other colleges in and around the Bay Area. It seems to Baker that true risk assessment is not being done at any of the schools and that the impetus could be locational – Bay Area schools (but not Stanford or Berkeley,) or political – for example, a number of classically liberal small colleges back east like Bennington College have mandates in-place.

“This is being done for the appearance of safety by people who do not understand the data,” Hoeg said.

For all its pandemic posturing, how did in fact Santa Clara County hold up compared to the rest of the state? A bit better, actually, with a death rate (note – we are aware of the problems with the official numbers and use them only for comparison purposes) of one-tenth of one percent of its population with a vaccination rate of about 85%.

The state as a whole had a death rate of about one-quarter of one percent and a vaccination rate of about 73%

However, it must be strongly noted that vaccination rates do not track terribly well with death rates and that population age and obesity rates are far more in line with actual outcomes.  Being a relatively young and prosperous county, it is not surprising Santa Clara “did better” during the pandemic.

To make this point clear, Imperial County had a death rate of six-tenths of one percent, one of the highest in the state.

It also had a vaccination rate of 95% – the highest in the state.

I’m sure that’s comforting to the students at Santa Clara University.

And here are the questions regarding Baker’s letter SCU did not respond to:

The letter asks for a justification of the policy now that the pandemic is over, amongst other items.

Could you confirm receipt, and, if possible, comment on any or all of the points made?

If not, could you at least provide a comment regarding why SCU is one of only a handful of schools nationwide still requiring vaccines?