Universities Receive Incentives for COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates: Federal Government Money Favors
More than 1000 US colleges and universities mandate Covid-19 vaccines for students as a condition of enrollment. Of these, 325 mandate boosters. Mandates were imposed in mid-2021, and justified as necessary to stop the campus spread of Covid-19 and keep students and more vulnerable members of the community safe. There is no evidence that colleges conducted an independent risk-benefit analysis before imposing mandates.
They appear to have relied solely on flawed guidance from public health institutions.
The mandates are insupportable. The otherwise healthy student is at essentially zero risk from serious illness or death from infection, and the shots do not prevent community spread as we were originally led to believe by the CDC.
Most importantly, the shots carry risk of serious harm to the student age group, which is reason enough to end mandates.
Student injuries and deaths have occurred, yet colleges have not acknowledged or investigated them.
Why continue these harmful policies? At No College Mandates, we suspect a number of reasons, including the following: financial incentives, solicitation of favor from governmental and corporate entities, the use of subjects for data collection, and institutional laziness. We intend to examine all in subsequent essays. In this part, we will focus on favors from the Federal Government.
The examination of all colleges is beyond the scope of this essay, so we will focus on the institutions of the Ivy League – all of which mandate Covid-19 vaccination and have employed strict testing and other mitigation efforts – to illustrate the magnitude of federal money that flows to colleges. We will also examine participation in the White House College Vaccine Challenge as a vehicle for colleges to curry government favor.
In 2021 alone, the eight colleges of the Ivy League – all considered “private” – received a staggering amount of $3.8 billion dollars from the Federal Government.
This is more or less in-line with recent years, though slightly higher due to the Department of Education’s Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) for Covid-19.
Of the $3.8 billion, 68% was granted from the Department of Health and Human Services, two of the eleven operating divisions are the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health – neither is a remotely disinterested party on the subject of Covid-19 vaccination. The CDC’s role in Covid-19 shot promotion needs no comment here.
The NIH is an enthusiastic promoter of mass Covid-19 vaccination across all age groups and is a joint patent holder with Moderna for the Covid-19 mRNA technology, from which it stands to benefit. The Fauci-headed National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is part of the NIH. To be clear, most HHS funding has nothing to do with Covid-19 research or policies directly. However, imagine being the recipient of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in HHS grants each year and having long-standing relationships with employees of the NIH and the CDC. Would you not be inclined to mandate the Covid-19 shot for all of your stake-holders? Would you not be inclined to follow all CDC recommendations without question?
To dismiss this pressure is to ignore the absolute fact that money is influence.
The White House and the Department of Education launched the White House College Vaccine Challenge in May of 2021. Through this program, the White House, in essence, asked colleges to act as sales and marketing departments for the companies that produce the EUA Covid-19 shots. Participating colleges “commit to taking three key actions” to get as many shots in arms as possible:
“… engaging every student, faculty, and staff member; organizing their college communities; and delivering vaccine access for all.”
The program provides participating colleges with marketing toolkits to promote vaccination and support for setting up on-campus vaccination clinics. By participating, a college gains recognition from the White House and signals to the Department of Education (the grantor of HEERFs ) that they are in alignment with their suggested campus mitigation efforts. Participation is voluntary, but if you were the recipient of millions of government dollars annually, would you not wish to show that you were in line with the agendas of the Department of Education and the White House?
By taking vast sums of federal money yearly and by participating in federal government initiatives created to push pharmaceutical products, colleges give up autonomy and compromise their moral imperative to do what is in the best interest of their students. This is especially true in the time of Covid-19. There is no proof that colleges have committed to high vaccination rates directly in exchange for money or favor. However, the indirect pressure to achieve that goal must not be ruled out as one of the reasons for the persistence of unscientific and harmful vaccine mandates on college campuses.
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Thank you for this research!! How can they care so little for their students?!? So sad that they sold these young, usually healthy, kids’ health for grant money…I believe some kids will suffer autoimmune conditions, heart conditions, and/or neurological issues. They must be sued for the damage to prevent this kind of callous disregard in the future.