In case you haven’t heard, Stanford mandated that students must get boosted by Jan. 31 — or else.
When Paul Offit — director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, decades-long enemy of the anti-vax movement and co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine — tells his own twenty-something son not to get boosted, you might start to ask some questions about the wisdom of Stanford’s latest mandate.
It is becoming clear: Mandating boosters is an affront against the medical and bodily autonomy of Stanford students. That is why I started a petition to Stanford leadership to rescind the booster mandate. I will lay out my case here, but I encourage everyone to read the petition itself and draw their own conclusions. If you agree that getting boosted should be a personal decision, let Stanford know.
To start with, our campus is already extremely well-protected against COVID-19. We are over 95% fully vaccinated. Our student body is overwhelmingly young. The latest CDC estimate is that 18–49 years old, fully vaccinated people are hospitalized from COVID-19 at the rate of 8 in 1,000,000. If you’re under 30, that’s 4 in 1,000,000. The pre-pandemic rate of hospitalization from the flu was 100 times that, but Stanford (rightly) didn’t mandate flu vaccines back then.