Fordham University Mandated the Bivalent Booster. The Deadline is November 1st. Members of the Fordham community are outraged. They are speaking out and taking action. Good for them!
by Paul Alexander
Fordham says the mandate is to “protect the community” but it is well known that these shots do not prevent transmission, and it is unethical and abusive to force healthy young adults to take this
No College Mandates and Lucia Sinatra
‘Fordham proclaims the mandate is to “protect the community” but it is well known that these shots do not prevent transmission, and it is unethical and abusive to force healthy young adults to take a novel injection that has no human safety data.’
‘To date, Fordham is the only school in New York State to mandate the bivalent booster. This includes prestigious schools such as Columbia University, New York University and the entire SUNY/CUNY system. Apparently the newly appointed President of Fordham, Tania Tetlow, knows better than the city of New York which recently voted to rescind its private employer vaccine mandate. She is also completely oblivious to the recent decision by a lower court judge in New York who ordered that the City must reinstate all fired unvaccinated city employees because “[b]eing vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting COVID-19.” The judge’s opinion also noted that the mandate “violates… due process rights” and is “arbitrary and capricious.”’
What are we really talking about here?
Well, ‘Limited evidence of effect. The latest booster is a “bi-valent” vaccine. This means it will contain a mix of mRNA from the original COVID strain and the currently circulating variant, Omicron BA.5. The drug companies mostly presented the VRBPAC with data on a bivalent vaccine using an earlier Omicron variant, BA.1. They had minimal data on specific vaccination using BA.4 or BA.5. Pfizer literally presented a slide of using BA.5 mRNA in an eight-mouse study they completed the day of the meeting. No human clinical data were presented to show that the bivalent boosters improve the prevention of severe disease. The hybrid vaccines reliably raised antibodies, but, as board member Dr. Ofer Levy put it, there was “no correlate of protection” against COVID.
No safety data. Literally none. When efficacy data are limited to a just-in-time eight-mouse study, it should come as no surprise there are no safety data for the new combination. The committee was uneasy, but ultimately chose to learn about any new side effects after rollout. This is particularly concerning for adolescent and young adult males. While they have among the lowest risk for COVID complications, they have the highest risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis. The booster will contain Omicron mRNA, and we have no idea whether this increases that risk. As Dr Cody Meissner put it “the question that bothers me (is that) we haven’t discussed safety, myocarditis. Might we increase the risk of that if we use a bivalent vaccine?”
It’s not 2020 any more. The world has changed since that first emergency use authorization (EUA). COVID is still highly prevalent, but, as a committee member put it, increasingly resembling other cold viruses. At the beginning of the pandemic the US faced a virus against which there was no preexisting immunity or treatment. That is no longer the case.
The current population, through a combination of vaccination, prior infection and treatment has increasingly broad resistance to SARS-CoV-2. With each new exposure, the risk of severe outcomes continues to fall. This was seen clearly in a slide by FDA, showing that, despite surges of COVID cases, the number of fatalities relative to the cases declined with each new wave. While there are still high-risk populations, the truth is that COVID is no longer an emergency for most people (David McCune).’
