Why I filed a lawsuit against my university s COVID vaccine mandate | The College Fix
As a conservative Republican student at Rutgers University, I have defended American exceptionalism, Donald Trump, Israel s right to exist, and many other hot-button issues without too much blowback from peers.
But never in my four years at Rutgers have I received such vicious, vulgar and venomous personal attacks than I have since taking a stand against my school s vaccine mandate.
In emails and direct messages on social media over the last week, I ve been called a monster, a fake Christian, a murderer, stupid, irresponsible, a liar, and better off dead. The messages are peppered with profanity, attack my religion and character, and wish me harm.
I believe anyone who wants to be vaccinated should do so, but those who do not want to be vaccinated should be free to abstain without being denied their education and without being discriminated against and segregated based on their vaccination status.
I’m not sure what position I should have about this. I’ve been vaccinated myself as has everyone in my family. As I understand things — and for this I rely on my doctor and LWJ who is a doctor but as she often reminds me, not *my* doctor — the vaccine greatly reduces my chances of getting Covid and if I do get it, of getting a serious case.
I’m almost 64 and have various co-morbidities, such as high blood pressure. I understand the vaccine has some risks associated with it, but these risks are extremely small, if the numbers available from the CDC and other (admittedly tarnished) authorities are to be believed. It looks like we’ll have to get booster shots, and I understand the argument that we should be using a “sterilizing” vaccine rather than the “leaky” ones we are using. But we don’t happen to have a sterilizing vaccine at the moment, and the leaky ones are all we have. If the leaks cause (in a manner of speaking) the virus(es) to mutate into a form that is both more contagious and more virulent, it’s true, we’re f*&ked, but that hasn’t happened yet and that’s not usually the way viruses behave. Now it’s true, this corona virus may be different, especially if it’s the product of genetic manipulation. But the evolutionary dynamics are such that a milder virus is more adaptive than a more dangerous one, so that is less likely than not, whether the virus is the product of nature or the lab. Not much assurance, but it’s the best chances we’ve got, and those chances are far better, it seems to me, than the chances of not getting killed on the freeway any day of the week. So it looks to me like we’ll probably be ok if we are vaccinated.
If you choose not to get vaccinated, you’re taking a bigger chance with your health, but not such a big chance. The issue is whether you have a bigger risk of spreading the virus to persons who are vaccinated. This also strikes me as a bit of a non-problem, because of the level of protection afforded by the vaccines. This is after all, the only kind of protection that’s worth having! But it’s also true that enough people need to get a vaccine to get our population to herd immunity; how much is uncertain. If not enough people get vaccinated, we won’t make it there. Of course, it’s also true that the variants may make it the case that we won’t reach herd immunity in any case. If this is the case, it looks probable to me that Covid will evolve to become endemic, and it will be like the various respiratory influenzas are now, endemic to the human condition. Given all these uncertainties, it seems ridiculous to me to mandating vaccines on the general population, though doing so for lines of work that put you in contact with other people seems reasonable for employers, for example, to do.
Having walked through this, it does seem reasonable to me (though I could be persuaded otherwise) for a school such as Rutgers to require students (and professors!) to be vaccinated, whether one is a conservative Republican or not, or even a libertarian.