Health officials could decide on a vaccine mandate for Nevada college students

Nevada’s Board of Health will consider Friday whether to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for students of public colleges and universities. 

The move would add vaccines against COVID-19 to the list of required inoculations that includes shots against tetanus, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella and bacterial meningitis.

Existing code allows colleges to require proof of immunity to “any other disease specified by the State Board of Health” as a condition of enrollment. However, a draft of the proposed regulation for the Board of Health explicitly makes being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Nov. 1 a requirement to attend classes in-person at any public university, state college, or community college. 

As is also the current law for mandated vaccines against other diseases, students could be exempt from a COVID-19 shot if getting it would go against religious belief or medical advice. In either case, they would need to provide their college with a written statement; a doctor would need to write the note for a medical exemption. No other exemptions are given.

The proposal has some support among students, faculty and parents. And, as is always the case, it has vehement opposition.

The board will meet remotely over Zoom Friday morning, so many public comments are being submitted in writing. As of Thursday afternoon, the board had posted about 230 comments. 

One comes from Jamie Voyles, a UNR biology professor who teaches courses on immunology, medical microbiology, and epidemiology. 

“A vaccine mandate is critical to ensuring the health and well-being of the university community — as well as the general public — in Reno, Nevada,” Voyles wrote to the board. “The Board of Regents cannot mandate this vaccine. Nor can I or any of my colleagues. I urge you to make vaccine mandates for students an urgent priority.”

Katherine Zander said two of her children attend UNR, and a COVID-19 vaccine mandate is the same as existing vaccine requirements “aside from the highly political (and deluded) nature of arguments against it.” 

“We would do a disservice to everyone who cares about the health and safety of people on our campuses, if we dismissed the efficacy and importance of vaccination against a disease that shut down our campuses for 17 months,” she wrote. “We would also perjure the very ideals of science taught and celebrated at our institutions.”

College of Southern Nevada math instructor Reuel Smith said a mandate as part of a “war on COVID-19” demands prompt action.

“If this analogy has any merit at all — and I think it does — then why is (it) not possible for the state Board of Health and the Nevada System of Higher Education to indeed act with the urgency that any war would demand?” Smith wrote.

The majority of commenters were against it. Many opponents submitted form letters calling mandates a violation of the Nuremberg Code, a set of principles against human medical experimentation that resulted from one of the Nuremberg trials that held Nazis accountable for the atrocities of the Holocaust. 

Justine Ross, who identified herself as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs clinic in Reno, said mandating the vaccines “violates a person’s bodily autonomy and strips a person of many basic human rights.”

“At what point do we stop stripping people of their rights ‘for the greater good’?” she asked. “It’s a fine line when we decide that the rights of the state outweigh the rights of the individual.”

Another parent, Jeff Strait, said he wouldn’t allow his children to get the vaccine.

“I will send them to an out-of state university that does not engage in these types of authoritarian and immoral mandates,” he wrote.

The meeting starts at 9 a.m. For the Zoom link, go here.