Over 700 US universities have instituted a Covid vaccine mandate. I think UK universities should do the same.

I think this for two reasons. First, universities need an extremely high level of vaccination for the next year to run well. Second, it will be difficult to get levels high enough without a mandate.

On the first point, what proportion of university students need to be vaccinated?

  • In the US, Rice University had to move its teaching online due to Covid outbreaks, even though 94% of students were vaccinated.
  • This study says that “if 90% coverage with an 85%-effective vaccine can be attained, the model finds that campus activities can be fully resumed”.
  • Last year was chaotic, with almost no in-person teaching. National case numbers are currently roughly nine times higher than they were at the beginning of term last September. A hugely oversimplified back-of-the-envelope calculation suggest to reduce cases nine-fold with an 90% effective vaccine requires vaccinating (1 – 1/9) / 0.9 = 98% of students.

It seems to me that universities need be aiming for getting well over 90% of students vaccinated. (Note that at the beginning of term, many vaccinated students will still only have first doses, which are less than 85 or 90% effective.) Currently, 64% of 18 to 24-year-olds in England have had one vaccine dose and 37% have had two doses – and I’d guess it’s even lower for the younger 18 to 21 sub-demographic that covers most university students. So there’s a lot of work to do here.

I should be clear: The reason we need very high levels of vaccination is not that students are personally at high risk – a typical healthy 18 year-old who catches Covid is unlikely to experience anything worse than a few days in bed. Rather, it’s that Covid outbreaks put in-person teaching at risk. Last year, my own university tried to do small-group teaching in person; yet during week 2 of term, so many students either had Covid, or were self-isolating because their housemates did, that everything had to be run twice, in-person and online, at very short notice, and the whole thing was a chaotic mess. In Week 3, we bowed to the inevitable and moved everything online, where it has stayed ever since. It’s that that universities want to avoid.

I’m glad to hear that many universities are coordinating with their local NHS trusts to get vaccines available on campus. I’m pleased to see Sussex University experimenting with a vaccine lottery. But I think that to get coverage of well over 90% we need some stick as well as the carrot.

When I say a “vaccine mandate”, what I really mean is this: it should be more inconvenient to be unvaccinated than to get the vaccine. It’s all very well bringing the vaccine truck up to the student union and giving people a free coffee or something, but that’s still more effort, at a very busy and exciting time, than just not bothering. So my “vaccine mandate” policy would be something like this:

Anyone who regularly comes on campus – student or staff – who hasn’t been vaccinated once by the start of the semester (and twice by the start of the second semester in January), must receive a negative Covid test twice a week and register it on a University website. Anyone who has neither registered their vaccination nor registered a negative test in the previous four days will be contacted to remind them not to use communal residential spaces and not enter campus except to take a test. All students may take advantage of online teaching offerings at all time.

Note that this policy has a universal exception available for anyone who – for religious, health or political reasons, or just because they couldn’t be bothered – doesn’t wish to take the vaccine, but that keeps them and everyone else safe: regular asymptomatic testing. But critically, this is more hassle than just getting vaccinated. Note also that my policy has very lax enforcement – you’re just contacted to remind you of the rules! And I’m happy for the registration of vaccination to be very poorly protected against fraud. Again: the goal of the policy is not to make it literally impossible for unvaccinated students to smuggle their way onto campus; it’s just to make it inconvenient and annoying to be unvaccinated.

I think this is all very sensible. But vaccine mandates for universities are not just not-popular, they’re hardly discussed at all. One of the few organisations to even mention the idea is my own union, the UCU, which gives vaccine mandates a pretty casual brush-off:

Making vaccinations compulsory as a condition [for students] to access their education is wrong and would be hugely discriminatory against those who are unable to be vaccinated, and international students.

It’s so obvious that it’s “wrong” that the UCU doesn’t even need to explain why. It says it’s “hugely discriminatory against those who are unable to be vaccinated” – I agree that asking those unable to be vaccinated to take tests is a little inconvenient for them, but it keeps them safe, it keeps their colleagues safe, and it ensures they can receive the education they’re entitled to. It also says it’s “hugely discriminatory against […] international students” – I don’t see why; my entirely non-fraud-proof registration scheme will accept vaccinations performed abroad, and if international students haven’t had the chance to be vaccinated at home, we’re just asking them to pay a quick visit to the vaccine truck during freshers’ week.

Meanwhile, my own university next semester is going to be in the absurd position of mandating masks – super-annoying to wear, sometimes you forget and leave it at home, and which we think are probably a little bit effective – and not mandating vaccination – one-off inconvenience, literally in your bloodstream, and which we’re sure is incredibly, almost miraculously, effective.

Update (April 2022)

So, in the end, my University, like all UK universities, did not institute a vaccine mandate. (And to whatever extent there was a mask mandate, it was entirely unpoliced and almost universally flouted.) And yet: things went sort of OK, I think? Cases among students this year were very much lower than last year (although cases among staff were higher – it was suggested to me that these were likely parents of unvaccinated teenagers, and that this, not University students themselves, was the main way cases were circulating in the University).

I can think of two arguments for what happened here. One argument is that although university students are largely in under-vaccinated age cohorts, they are very considerably more vaccinated than the non-university-attending members of their cohort, and also the University’s on-campus vaccine drive was a success, so I was far too pessimistic about vaccination levels in the absence of a mandate. Further, any unvaccinated (and many vaccinated) 18-to-21-year-olds would by now have got Covid, so would have immunity (or extra immunity) that way. So a mandate would have been a lot of fuss for a very marginal gain in immunity levels, so would have probably been more bother than its benefit.

The second argument is that we managed to keep Covid numbers relatively low at the University only by cancelling (or, rather, moving online) huge amounts of in-person teaching – everything except very small groups – and, in response, student performance was far, far lower than previous years. Indeed, in my own module, failures rates were pretty disastrous. To call this “things went sort of OK” is ridiculous. If only we’d listened to me and had a vaccine mandate, we could have done all this teaching in person again, and all the students who did basically no work all year and had terrible academic outcomes would have done much better.

I’m genuinely not sure whether I find the second argument (“I was actually correct all along”) or the first argument (“I was wrong actually”) more persuasive.

(Also, apparently the outbreak at heavily-vaccinated Rice University that I mentioned above was a bunch of false positives based on a testing error.)