With universities prepping for a return to in-person teaching and on-campus living this fall, Republican lawmakers have spent recent weeks attempting to block public and private institutions from requiring students to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Right-wing media outlets have, in turn, pounced on the controversy, making campus vaccine requirements the latest front in their insurgency against the White House’s herd immunity plan.
During a Wednesday night appearance on Fox News, Charlie Kirk, the cofounder of the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA, drew a parallel between student vaccine requirements and the racist caste system once mandated in South Africa. “We are going to give everything we have to make sure that students are not going to have to live in a medical apartheid because they don’t want to get the vaccine,” Kirk told Tucker Carlson. “It’s almost this apartheid-style open-air hostage situation, like, Oh, you can have your freedom back if you get the jab. This is unacceptable; we’re going to fight back against it.” Carlson, who falsely claimed in May that a subversive “national [vaccination] mandate” is being imposed on college students, affirmed his guest, saying, “That’s exactly right.”
Kirk used his time on Tucker Carlson Tonight to announce Turning Point USA’s new “No Forced Vax” campaign, which will “fight back against forced campus vaccinations” and supposedly operate chapters in 2,500 high schools and universities, according to a press release. “Rogue administrators are trying to thwart [students’] educational goals and force them to publicly share their medical history,” the group’s website states. “The government has taken many strides to ease their way into private [citizens’] lives, and mandatory vaccinations are the newest way in which they can do so.” The campaign will also host “hundreds of local gatherings, school tabling events this fall, and a larger digital campaign designed to educate and embolden local health care officials, teachers, administrators, students, and parents to defend a student’s right to choose.”
In reality, just 572—of more than 5,000 colleges and universities in the United States—have announced vaccine requirements, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. And in states like Arizona and Florida, GOP leaders have signed executive orders or legislation barring schools from putting such requirements in place. As more contagious COVID-19 variants continue to spread, these decisions could prove detrimental during the fall school year, particularly as the vaccination rate is “lowest among adults aged 18–29 years,” according to a June report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “If the current rate of weekly vaccine initiation continues through August, coverage among young adults will not reach the coverage level of older adults,” the report continued. “High vaccination coverage among all age groups is important for decreasing COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, especially among groups with lower vaccination uptake, such as young adults.”
In a Federalist article last week titled “How College COVID Vaccine Mandates Put Students In Danger,” a group of authors for the right-wing site took the argument against campus vaccination mandates to its most extreme, warning that such requirements “put students at unnecessary risk of serious complications, including hospitalization and death.” The group of authors, who presented themselves as medical professionals and experts, wrote that vaccination mandates “are unethical” and “create a clear and present danger to the health, and potentially, the lives, of students subject to these mandates,” alleging that universities are only adopting them “for public-relations reasons, not on a medical basis.”
One Fox News medical expert, Peter McCullough, M.D., went so far as to steal the Joe Rogan argument, asserting on Wednesday that no college-age person in America should receive the COVID-19 vaccine. “Overall, the equation is very unfavorable for vaccination of anyone below age 30,” he said during an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s program Wednesday night. “Unless we really have a compelling case, no one under age 30 should receive any one of these vaccines.”
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