Some college programs still require COVID-19 vaccines, often on the sly

While most colleges have dropped their COVID-19 vaccine mandates, some medical and nursing schools continue to enforce them – directly or through clinical partners.

Advocacy group No College Mandates said the requirements persist despite a February executive order from President Donald Trump aimed at ending mandates. The group’s co-founder, Lucia Sinatra, told the College Fix her group wants federal lawmakers to pass legislation codifying the order.

“For whatever reason, healthcare students and healthcare programs seem to be governed by different rules than general population student programs at colleges,” she said.

Sinatra said she doesn’t know the exact number of schools still requiring COVID-19 vaccination, especially since schools sometimes hide their mandates.

“Some programs require compliance, or you won’t be accepted to the program,” she said, adding others may admit students without a mandate but later require vaccination to finish their studies.

Examples include nursing students at Texas Wesleyan University, the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, and medical students at Emory University and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. These schools require students to receive COVID-19 vaccinations to enter their nursing and medical school programs.

Sinatra said some universities never mention requirements on their websites, while others rely on clinical partners to enforce COVID-19 vaccine mandates. This can leave students surprised after they are already enrolled.

At the University of Washington (UW), some clinical partners require vaccination, but the school itself does not.

“UW Medicine, as a major clinical placement site for UW health sciences students, will not be requiring students placed at its facilities to have the COVID-19 vaccine,” UW spokesperson Victor Balta told the College Fix.

Other schools lack this flexibility, including the University of San Francisco’s Schools of Nursing and Health Professions.

“Nursing students should be aware that all of our clinical partners, at which our students may be placed for clinical learning experiences, are currently requiring all students to be fully vaccinated before beginning training and learning at the site,” the school’s website says. “Degree completion may be slowed or stopped if SONHP students are unable and/or unwilling to be vaccinated, given the requirements of our clinical partners.”

Sinatra has been pressing Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to address the issue, and she is lobbying Congress.

Rep. Mark Messmer, R-Indiana, has introduced legislation to bar vaccine mandates in higher education, but Sinatra said it doesn’t go far enough.

“It’s protection for general population students,” she said, but the bill lacks “explicit protection for healthcare students who are the only college students still mandated to take COVID-19 vaccines.”