Cornell’s COVID policies don’t make sense

Even if Cornell’s administrators have good intentions, some of their policies go too far.

Take the university’s recent “Return to Campus Work Guidance,” for instance. Along with the perennial appeal for faculty and staff to get their booster shot and temporary remote work accommodations, the university also unveiled this.

Any unvaccinated faculty and staff must resume surveillance testing next week, regardless of whether you will be working on campus. (emphasis added)

Regardless of whether you will be working on campus? The university, seemingly in a pursuit of a case-mitigation strategy, is concerned about the spread of COVID-19 on campus. Remote work accommodations may make sense to slow the spread of Omicron. But the university has yet to explain how testing unvaccinated faculty and staff (who are working remotely) adds any benefit to public health, especially amid a nationwide COVID-19 test shortage.

Cornell University administrators have also promulgated a new COVID-19 booster mandate for the upcoming semester, as the Cornell Review previously reported. However, as the Hill reports, “A United Kingdom Health Security Agency report published on Thursday suggests that the effectiveness of the COVID-19 booster against symptomatic infections of the omicron variant wanes within 10 weeks.” Additionally, as epidemiology and biostatistics professor Vinay Prasad noted in December:

A thin, healthy 16 to 40 year old man with no medical problems has something to gain and something to lose from taking a booster. The potential benefit is a short term reduction in mild symptomatic disease (that’s known with some confidence). The uncertain benefit is whether there is a reduction in severe covid or hospitalization in this age group. At the same time, there is something to lose, a 3rd dose could precipitate myocarditis. Myocarditis, like all AEs, falls across a distribution. Many events will be mild, and most may self resolve, but some will not be mild, as the nature of idiosyncratic adverse events, and some may lead to long term issues.

Prasad also writes in the same piece, “For boys/men 16-40, [there] is massive uncertainty whether or not the third dose will confer net benefit, and that is not suitable for regulatory science.”

Now, to its credit, the university has already laid out a process for obtaining a medical exemption from the COVID-19 booster requirement. However, when it comes to possible exemptions after an assessment of personal risk, it seems that the administration is even ignoring the Center for Disease Control’s own recommendation on boosters. The CDC’s guidance states that individuals “may receive a booster shot…based on their individual benefits and risks.” There is also no exemption for natural immunity. The administration has seemingly ignored any possibility of natural immunity offering protection, something even the NCAA recognized in its winter sports guidelines. Furthermore, the university has not even released a religious exemption process, despite the rapidly approaching January 31 deadline.

Given the lengths to which the administration would go to prevent the spread of COVID-19, one would think that they would surely cancel large sporting events. But alas, university administrators announced,  “Athletic events will continue, with proper protocols in place, as scheduled during these two weeks.” In fact, tickets to Lynah rink are still being sold, albeit with limited capacity seating (One must wonder how we’d throw the fish at Harvard this year. Plastic wrap, perhaps?). In a subsequent statement, university president Martha Pollack explained:

Similarly, while there might be a marginal reduction in infection transmission if we were to close all recreational facilities or libraries for the first two weeks of the semester, that is outweighed by the benefit to student wellbeing of keeping them open, with appropriate masking requirements, and thereby providing students with an outlet for physical activity when it is generally too cold in Ithaca for outdoor exercise and with places to study on campus. (emphasis added)

One surely thinks that officials had “benefits to student well-being” in mind when they “substantially limited” in-person student activities for two weeks. 

Oddly enough, Pollack said the quiet part out-loud when she wrote, “While there are no perfect solutions, there are important trade-offs that underlie each of these decisions.” While she is right that there are tradeoffs, it should be the students who should be making them, not the administrators. The fact remains that we have a 97% on-campus vaccination rate and had no serious cases of COVID-19, according to the university itself. Compared to where we were in March 2020, individuals now have a variety of options to treat COVID-19, including three vaccines, multiple therapeutics, and monoclonal antibody treatments.

We’ve come a long way since March 2020. It’s time to trade Cornell’s COVID dystopia for common sense and a genuine college experience.

Editor’s note – After original publication, the author found that the description of the Oxford-conducted study given by the Cornellians Against the Booster Mandate group was not clear. The Oxford-conducted study in an earlier version of this piece was of “people aged 16 or older vaccinated for COVID-19 in England,” not just “men under the age of 40.” The author has decided to remove this sentence and replace it with a clearer source. The Imperial College modelling cited in the original piece compared booster efficacy against different strains of COVID-19, not the efficacy of the booster regime to a two-dose regimen. The citation was removed and replaced.