Reason for Not Requiring Vaccinations? Penn State Would Rather Not Say

When an organization offers a non-explanation as an explanation, you can’t help suspecting that it doesn’t want you to know the real explanation, probably because it’s embarrassing. 

For the past week, I’ve been trying to get someone to answer a simple question: Why no COVID vaccine requirement at Penn State?

Hundreds of universities across the country are requiring students to be vaccinated this fall. More than half of the schools in the Big Ten have imposed mandatory vaccinations. 

So why aren’t we among them? 

When I posed my question to Nick Jones, Penn State’s second-in-command, he referred me to a FAQ page on Penn State’s website. The relevant paragraph goes like this: 

“President Barron made clear his view that the educational and incentives-based approach the University has taken, and positive survey data, together with the systematic tightening of monitoring, testing and mitigation measures we announced, particularly requirements for non-vaccinated individuals, represent the right approach for Penn State to help keep the community safe.” 

Does that sound like an explanation to you? It tells us that President Barron “made clear his view” that voluntary vaccinations are “the right approach.” It doesn’t say why. 

I next approached a faculty member involved in developing Penn State’s COVID policies for this semester. She punted me over to Penn State’s Office of Strategic Communications – never a welcome development for an inquiring journalist. Sure enough, a PR person pointed me to the same “clear” paragraph.

In another recent Penn State news release, an infectious diseases specialist at Penn State Hershey vouched for the safety of the vaccines and stressed the urgency of everyone getting vaccinated as quickly as possible. When I asked her what she thought of the current policy, she declined, through a PR guy, to answer. I don’t blame her.

So what doesn’t Old Main want us to know? That it’s capitulating to pressure from anti-vaxxers in the Republican-controlled state legislature? To anti-vaxxers on the Board of Trustees? To anti-vaxxers among some deep-pocketed donors? 

Two days after I started nosing around – after The Atlantic published a sharply worded critique of Penn State’s COVID-19 policies by English Professor Paul Kellermann, and with a no-confidence vote pending in the Faculty Senate and a “Vaccinate Penn State” rally planned for the Old Main steps – Old Main’s strategic communicators put the university’s COVID strategy through another spin cycle. 

What came out offered a couple of hints at what’s driving current policy, but if they shed any light, they also generated a lot of heat. 

This time, President Barron’s “Open Letter to the Penn State Community” acknowledged that the legislature’s power to further shrink its 11 percent sliver of the university’s budget pie is at least part of the COVID policy calculus. 

That didn’t mollify too many folks at the Faculty Senate meeting or at the rally. One sign at the rally said, “Barron Trades Lives for Lucre.”

(A little harsh, maybe. One can appreciate the pressures these well-intentioned decision makers are under, even as we call on them not to succumb. On the other hand, Temple University, which also gets money from the state, just announced its own vaccine mandate, in accordance with a citywide policy in Philadelphia.)

Even more disturbing was the open letter’s invocation of a national poll showing a near-even split between those who favor mandatory vaccinations and those opposed. 

Defenders of the university’s current approach might contend that if there are honest differences of opinion among Penn State’s various constituencies and around the country about the efficacy or safety of the coronavirus vaccines, it makes sense that the university respect those differences by not forcing anyone to do what they do not want to do.

But here’s the deal, as Joe Biden likes to say: The university is emphatically not agnostic on the vaccine question. In that earlier “right approach” news release, President Barron is quoted as saying that “Penn State is not impartial when it comes to getting vaccinated. The university’s stance is that everyone who can get a vaccine should do so as soon as possible…” 

In other words, Penn State emphatically stands with the scientific consensus that the vaccines are the safest and surest way out of this miserable era of masks, social distancing, closures and remote working and learning.

Except that it also stands with those who choose to ignore the scientific consensus. 

That is not leadership.

Indeed, you might say we’re giving as much credence to the views of those who think the vaccines are a microchip delivery system as we are to the views of our own Faculty Senate, student leaders and in-house experts. (Even Matt Ferrari, the biology professor who took a leading role in crafting Penn State’s response to the pandemic last year, told me he doesn’t think the university’s testing-and-voluntary-vaccination policy goes far enough.)

As Washington Post columnist Max Boot noted last week, there’s nothing new about mandatory vaccinations. And students who don’t like it, as U.S. Judge Frank H. Easterbrook wrote in his opinion for the appeals court that upheld Indiana University’s vaccine mandate, can take their degree-seeking business elsewhere. “Plaintiffs,” Easterbrook wrote, “have ample educational opportunities.”

The harms of a no-mandate policy go way beyond risk to the university community, especially to those who might bring the virus home to vulnerable family members or unvaccinated children. When a supposed bastion of evidence-based thinking like Penn State backs away from a vaccine mandate, it provides intellectual cover for anti-vaxxers in the commonwealth and beyond: It suggests that the science in support of universal vaccination is not at all settled. 

Which means, in turn, that Republican politicians in Harrisburg and those freedom-loving governors and U.S. senators who hope to inherit Donald Trump’s share of the electorate in 2024 can continue to cynically frame mandatory vaccinations as another instance of overreaching governments and institutions encroaching on citizens’ rights to make their own decisions about their own bodies. (Never mind all the schools – including Penn State — that require their students to be vaccinated against various other diseases.)

At the beginning of the year, when the vaccines arrived, Penn Staters dared look forward to a normal fall semester: no zooming, no masks, no social distancing and the usual slate of campus activities.

Now, just days before the start of classes, the administration cleaves to that vision of normalcy despite rising COVID numbers, the virulence of the Delta variant and a vaccination rate that has not yet reached the level of herd immunity. The one concession to abnormality: We all must mask up. 

I never thought I’d say this, but after visiting the snuggeries I’ve been assigned to teach in this fall, I’d rather stay home, unmasked, and Zoom again. 

A couple of weeks ago, I agreed to attend this weekend’s Convocation, Penn State’s annual welcome pep rally for new students. Then I heard that the event is at the Bryce Jordan Center — indoors — and will be attended by 7,500 people, at least some of whom are sure to be unvaccinated. 

I bowed out. It’s not that I’m worried about getting sick (though perhaps I should be). I just think that under the circumstances, the whole event, like the university’s whole COVID-19 policy, is more than a little misguided.