OPINION:
The airports are filling up, restaurants are packed, gyms are open, and people are heading back to church. America is finally being unmasked. With an estimated 100 million Americans having some degree of natural immunity and another 174 million having at least one dose of the vaccine, the science suggests we’ve achieved near herd immunity.
All of this is welcome news, but for America’s young people, the vaunted so-called expert class seems committed to keep the pandemic going without regard to the science.
Hundreds of public and private colleges and universities are mandating vaccination before students can return to campus next semester. Unwarranted vaccine and mask mandates for young people are the remaining battlegrounds of this national assault on freedom and privacy.
It’s time to tell college administrators where to stick their mortarboards.
College-age Americans have a statistically insignificant risk from COVID-19 based on the CDC’s own data. Forcing the young, especially young women, to take a vaccine that is not medically necessary and not fully approved is at a minimum nonsensical.
The academe, researchers and medical bureaucrats who have led our COVID response are part of the same expert class. There is a Fauci-esque sense among them that they know best and must lead the great unwashed.
These are the same people who have us spending 48 percent of all federal spending on health care that doesn’t appear to be making Americans any healthier.
These groups are major drivers of America’s opinionocracy. Though they’ve been wrong or have flipped-flopped on virtually every aspect of our COVID-19 response, they’re not going to back down easily.
Liberals at our colleges and universities, who were anti-establishment in the ’60s and ’70s are now willing to blindly support politicians and Big Pharma to protect their influencer status. They’re willing to be anti-science and say and do anything to maintain their influence.
College students and their parents need to push back hard against vaccine mandates that stem not from science but from the arrogance of our nation’s legacy institutions. For decades young “rebels without a clue” have been staging campus demonstrations for everything from the right to kill the unborn to saving the whales. Now it’s time they take that protest culture and do something to protect themselves.
Our young people cannot allow themselves to be paralyzed by fear of the virus, liberal politicians, media indoctrination or their school’s self-interested faculty and administration.
Parents need to make it clear, if schools refuse to change their policies and insist on violating longstanding norms related to medical privacy and healthcare decision-making, they’ll find another institution. No student should be forced off campus or compelled to choose between their scholarship or taking a vaccine not fully approved by the FDA.
Parents and students should also be prepared to sue these institutions to recover damages sustained from nonsensical mandates that then negatively impact students academically, athletically or financially.
Financial supporters need to hit schools where it hurts as well. Major donors to colleges with vaccine mandates should simply stop giving. Those who have made planned gifts to a college or university that is forcing young people to take a vaccine they don’t need should change their wills.
It’s critical to remember that the left in America who control much of our higher education system aren’t really interested in choice. They are interested in hanging on to their relevance and protecting their power.
From the effectiveness of lockdowns and dismissing the lab-leak theory to rejecting preventative drugs and revelations experts lobbied for gain of function funding, the American intelligentsia have been exposed by COVID-19. The higher ed cabal is part of that crew.
Now is the time to have this fight, not in August. Force them to follow the science. Let’s get America’s students back on campus without compromising their rights, privacy and perhaps even their health.
• Tom Basile, host of Newsmax Television’s “America Right Now,” is an author and adjunct professor at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches earned media strategy.
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