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COVID-19

Harvard drops COVID vaccine mandate for students; other holdout colleges may follow suit

Published

2 years ago

8 minute read

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.”

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.

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COVID-19

University of Colorado will pay $10 million to staff, students for trying to force them to take COVID shots

Published on December 8, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine caused ‘life-altering damage’ to Catholics and other religious groups by denying them exemptions to its COVID shot mandate, and now the school must pay a hefty settlement.

The University of Colorado’s Anschutz School of Medicine must pay more than $10.3 million to 18 plaintiffs it attempted to force into taking COVID-19 shots despite religious objections, in a settlement announced by the religious liberty law firm the Thomas More Society.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in April 2021, the University of Colorado (UC) announced its requirement that all staff and students receive COVID jabs, leaving specific policy details to individual campuses. On September 1, 2021, it enforced an updated policy stating that “religious exemption may be submitted based on a person’s religious belief whose teachings are opposed to all immunizations,” but required not only a written explanation why one’s “sincerely held religious belief, practice of observance prevents them” from taking the jabs, but also whether they “had an influenza or other vaccine in the past.”

On September 24, the policy was revised to stating that “religious accommodation may be granted based on an employee’s religious beliefs,” but “will not be granted if the accommodation would unduly burden the health and safety of other Individuals, patients, or the campus community.”

In practice, the school denied religious exemptions to Catholic, Buddhist, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical, Protestant, and other applicants, most represented by Thomas More in a lawsuit contending that administrators “rejected any application for a religious exemption unless an applicant could convince the Administration that her religion ‘teaches (them) and all other adherents that immunizations are forbidden under all circumstances.’”

The UC system dropped the mandate in May 2023, but the harm had been done to those denied exemptions while it was in effect, including unpaid leave, eventual firing, being forced into remote work, and pay cuts.

In May 2024, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked the school for denying the accommodations. Writing for the majority, Judge Allison Eid found that a “government employer may not punish some employees, but not others, for the same activity, due only to differences in the employee’s religious beliefs.”

Now, Thomas More announces that year-long settlement negotiations have finally secured the aforementioned hefty settlement for their clients, covering damages, tuition costs, and attorney’s fees. It also ensured the UC will agree to allow and consider religious accommodation requests on an equal basis to medical exemption requests and abstain from probing the validity of applicants’ religious beliefs in the future.

“No amount of compensation or course-correction can make up for the life-altering damage Chancellor Elliman and Anschutz inflicted on the plaintiffs and so many others throughout this case, who felt forced to succumb to a manifestly irrational mandate,” declared senior Thomas More attorney Michael McHale. “At great, and sometimes career-ending, costs, our heroic clients fought for the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans who were put to the unconscionable choice of their livelihoods or their faith during what Justice Gorsuch has rightly declared one of ‘the greatest intrusion[s] on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.’ We are confident our clients’ long-overdue victory indeed confirms, despite the tyrannical efforts of many, that our shared constitutional right to religious liberty endures.”

On top of the numerous serious adverse medical events that have been linked to the COVID shots and their demonstrated ineffectiveness at reducing symptoms or transmission of the virus, many religious and pro-life Americans also object to the shots on moral grounds, due to the ethics of how they were developed.

Catholic World Report notes that similarly large sums have been won in other high-profile lawsuits against COVID shot mandates, including $10.3 million to more than 500 NorthShore University HealthSystem employees in 2022 and $12.7 million to a Catholic Michigander fired by Blue Cross Blue Shield in 2024.

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COVID-19

Canadian Health Department funds study to determine effects of COVID lockdowns on children

Published on December 5, 2025

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The commissioned study will assess the impact on kids’ mental well-being of COVID lockdowns and ‘remote’ school classes that banned outdoor play and in-person learning.

Canada’s Department of Health has commissioned research to study the impact of outdoor play on kids’ mental well-being in light of COVID lockdowns and “remote” school classes that, for a time, banned outdoor play and in-person learning throughout most of the nation. 

In a notice to consultants titled “Systematic Literature Reviews And Meta Analyses Supporting Two Projects On Children’s Health And Covid-19,” the Department of Health admitted that “Exposure to green space has been consistently associated with protective effects on children’s physical and mental health.”

A final report, which is due in 2026, will provide “Health Canada with a comprehensive assessment of current evidence, identify key knowledge gaps and inform surveillance and policy planning for future pandemics and other public health emergencies.”

Bruce Squires, president of McMaster Children’s Hospital of Hamilton, Ontario, noted in 2022 that “Canada’s children and youth have borne the brunt” of COVID lockdowns.

From about March 2020 to mid-2022, most of Canada was under various COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns, including mask mandates, at the local, provincial, and federal levels. Schools were shut down, parks were closed, and most kids’ sports were cancelled. 

Mandatory facemask polices were common in Canada and all over the world for years during the COVID crisis despite over 170 studies showing they were not effective in stopping the spread of COVID and were, in fact, harmful, especially to children.

In October 2021, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced unprecedented COVID-19 jab mandates for all federal workers and those in the transportation sector, saying the un-jabbed would no longer be able to travel by air, boat, or train, both domestically and internationally.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, a new report released by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) raised alarm bells over the “harms caused” by COVID-19 lockdowns and injections imposed by various levels of government as well as a rise in unexplained deaths and bloated COVID-19 death statistics.

Indeed, a recent study showed that COVID masking policies left children less able to differentiate people’s emotions behind facial expressions.

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