From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Harvard’s reversal constitutes the “beginning of the end of the COVID mandate, the final nail in the coffin.”

Prestigious Harvard University has finally abandoned its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for students, a surrender that could be the first of several dominoes to fall in academia.

Last month, LifeSiteNews reported that medical freedom group No College Mandates had identified 68 of the 1,216 undergraduate institutions of higher learning across the United States as still requiring students to take at least one mRNA COVID shot. The list includes Ivy League Harvard University, which said the shot is required for “all students who will be on campus” and that “registration holds (for classes) will be automatically applied” who “fall(s) out of compliance at any time for any of the required immunizations.” (Students could apply for medical or religious exemptions, however.)

On March 5, however, Harvard University Health Services (HUHS) announced that it “will no longer require students to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.” It continued to “strongly recommend that all members of the Harvard community stay up to date on COVID-19 vaccines, including boosters if eligible,” as well as “high-quality face mask(s) in crowded indoor settings and remaining at home if unwell.”

“This is a big deal. I am literally blown away,” No College Mandates co-founder Lucia Sinatra told The Epoch Times. “For Harvard to remove this language from the immunization forms is a huge sweeping move that is impossible to overstate. As goes Harvard, so goes the rest of the country, and I believe many of the small liberal arts colleges are now going to have a very hard time justifying the demand that young people take these shots now that Harvard has dropped it.”

Sinatra predicted that Harvard’s reversal constitutes the “beginning of the end of the COVID mandate, the final nail in the coffin.”

The COVID vaccines were developed and reviewed in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative. But while initially hailed as an unprecedented achievement embraced by many in both parties, a significant body of evidence has since arisen establishing that they carry significant health risks.

The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 37,231 deaths, 214,906 hospitalizations, 21,524 heart attacks, and 28,214 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of February 23, among other ailments. An April 2022 study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection itself cannot fully account for the myocarditis numbers despite common insistence to the contrary. VAERS reports are technically unconfirmed, as anyone can submit one, but U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.

A 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS’s) Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” On the problem of under-reporting, the VAERS website offers only that “more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones” (emphasis added).

In 2021, Project Veritas shed light on some of the reasons for such under-reporting with undercover video from inside Phoenix Indian Medical Center, a facility run under HHS’s Indian Health Service program, in which emergency room physician Dr. Maria Gonzales laments that myocarditis cases go unreported “because they want to shove it under the mat,” and nurse Deanna Paris attests to seeing “a lot” of people who “got sick from the side effects” of the COVID shots, but “nobody” is reporting them to VAERS “because it takes over a half hour to write the damn thing.”

Further, VAERS is not the only data source containing red flags. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).

Last September, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland, which found that the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” while the “Moderna trial exhibited a 6% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” for a combined “16% higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients.”

In December 2022, Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin hosted a roundtable discussion during which civil rights attorney Aaron Siri detailed data from the CDC’s V-Safe reporting system revealing that 800,000 of the system’s 10 million participants, or approximately 7.7%, reported needing medical care after COVID injection. “Twenty-five percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48 percent sought urgent care,” Siri added. “Also, another 25 percent on top of the 7.7 percent reported being unable to work or go to school.”

Another study by a team of American, British, and Canadian researchers, published last December in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found that COVID booster mandates for university students – a relatively healthy group at relatively low risk from the virus – do far more harm than good: “per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5-4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalization).”

Most recently, an analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published February in the journal Vaccine – the largest analysis to date – “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID vaccines, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.”

For those in the academic world still struggling under COVID vaccine mandates, No College Mandates offers on its website a variety of resources to help connect students and staff with resources to find information, counseling, and legal representation.