College Institutes Mask Mandate, Bans Student Gatherings Despite No Confirmed COVID Cases
Morris Brown College in Atlanta, which began classes last week, announced Sunday that it was reinstating its mask mandate for students and employees to protect against COVID-19, according to WSB-TV.
The college also banned parties and large student gatherings on its campus.
“Officials say there have been no confirmed COVID-19 cases among its students, but they have received reports from other schools in the Atlanta University Center,” WSB reported Monday.
The mask mandate will be in place for the next 14 days, along with temperature checks when coming to campus, social distancing and contact tracing.
Although the coronavirus public health emergency officially ended earlier this year, vaccination mandates linger at some colleges and universities as they open the fall semester.
More than 100 colleges require students attending in-person classes to have the shots, according to News Nation, which cited the group No College Mandates.
Morris Brown is among them, according to WSB.
as someone smart once said, “as Morris Brown College goes, so goes the rest of the country” https://t.co/mmQSL4T01R
— JJ Kasper (@JJ_Kasper) August 22, 2023
Also on the list is Rutgers University in New Jersey.
According to Newsweek, the school said its goal was to “minimize outbreaks of COVID-19 in the Rutgers University community; to prevent and reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19 among all persons at Rutgers University and Rutgers-affiliated healthcare units; and to promote the public health of the community in a manner consistent with federal, State, and local efforts to stem the COVID-19 pandemic as well as federal and State law.”
Students who are not fully vaccinated can’t attend classes on campus unless they have a medical or religious exemption.
However, students with exemptions might not be allowed to live on campus.
Rutgers deserves to lose millions & fail miserably for Communist force & Communist thinking.
Everyone needs to BudLight woke universities.
— LibertyDrumbeatz (@drumz3606) August 18, 2023
New Jersey state Sen. Declan O’Scanlon criticized the college.
“For Rutgers, which should be the preeminent scientific institution, public institution in New Jersey, to be clinging to this now anti-science and punishing students — life-changing punishment, by the way — is outrageous. The administrators at Rutgers should be ashamed of themselves,” the Republican said, according to NewsNation.
In a column for the Washington Examiner, Brad Polumbo said the mandates are “truly absurd and indefensible on public health grounds.”
“To start, COVID-19 vaccine mandates on college campuses never made much sense to begin with because most of the population of a typical campus — healthy 18-, 19-, 20-, and 21-year-olds — was never at significant risk of death or hospitalization from COVID,” Polumbo wrote. “If anything, campuses were much less vulnerable to the pandemic than almost anywhere else imaginable.”
He added, “Ultimately, these mandates aren’t rooted in science or public health. They’re simply a result of deeply ideological campus administrators wanting to assert their control and signal allegiance to their political tribe.
“But, when it comes to matters of bodily autonomy and medical freedom, that’s no way to make such important decisions.”
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