PROVIDENCE – Universities and businesses in Rhode Island are grappling with whether to require COVID-19 vaccinations for employees, and in the case of colleges, tens of thousands of students who will be returning to campuses.
The vaccines afford people protection from COVID-19, but not everyone can take them, or wants to. Whether to mandate a vaccination is a legal question for employers and universities, as well as a policy question.
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Almost 62,000 students attend universities in Rhode Island, according to Gov. Daniel J. McKee, and the state wants to encourage them to get vaccinated. When questioned this week at his regular COVID-19 briefing about vaccine mandates, he said he supports universities for doing so. Every college president has asked him, he said, to make the R.I. Department of Health available to help with their vaccine administrations.
“They’re in an age group [that] we’re very concerned about getting vaccinated,” McKee said.
Brown University and Roger Williams University have already opted to require vaccinations for students, joining a growing number of universities in the U.S. Cornell University in New York and Rutgers University, a state university in New Jersey, recently announced similar requirements.
Brown and Roger Williams University announced separately in the past week that they would require vaccinations for the fall semester, while creating exemptions for people who can cite medical or religious reasons for not getting a vaccine.
Brown University President Christina H. Paxson said all undergraduate, graduate and medical students will be required to take a COVID-19 vaccine to engage in in-person instruction. The university hasn’t yet decided whether to require the same of faculty and staff.
In an April 6 letter, Paxson said the university should be able to expect that the Fall 2021 semester looks more like 2019 than last year. “This planning is based on the increasing pace of vaccinations against COVID-19 and the expectation that the vast majority of the Brown community will be vaccinated by the end of the summer,” she wrote.
Roger Williams, in a statement, said it made its decision early to help prepare students and their parents for getting inoculated. It was among the first universities in the state to decide not to bring back students after spring break last year, and it enacted a strict, twice-a-week testing regimen for its students when they did return.
“August is not that far away,” the university said. “Experiential learning is the hallmark of our education and vaccination is the way to expand all those opportunities back to our students.”
Others are waiting.
The University of Rhode Island hasn’t decided yet. It is reviewing its immunization requirements for possible inclusion of the COVID-19 vaccine this fall, a spokeswoman said. If a vaccination requirement is made, the health policy will be shared with all students, said Linda Acciardo, in an emailed message.
For now, URI is strongly encouraging its students to get a vaccination as soon as they are eligible. And the health services team on campus hopes to be able to provide those vaccinations on-campus as soon as the state allocates supplies to university settings.
Other than Brown and Roger Williams universities, the state’s six other independent colleges and universities have not announced plans on vaccination requirements, said Dan Egan, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Rhode Island. He expects to see many universities follow suit, particularly in the Northeast, which has had high uptake of the vaccine in general.
If people don’t want to or can’t accept a vaccine, he said, universities can offer alternatives such as remote learning.
Public health experts have advised that if campuses can get communities to 80% vaccination, “then the need for social distancing, the need for surveillance testing, dramatically decreases and in some cases goes away. The sense is that institutions are already requiring four to five vaccinations. The ability to get to 80% gives the students and their families what they’re looking for, and that’s close to a pre-pandemic, ’normal’ college experience.”
Can businesses and universities legally require vaccination for COVID-19? That specific question hasn’t been tested by courts, but businesses have more rights to impose requirements, in general, than employers, according to Dorit Reiss, a professor at University of California Hastings College of the Law.
Employers have to follow laws that protect the rights of employees from discrimination, including the Equal Employment Opportunity laws and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Reiss recently co-wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review blog, examining whether and under what conditions colleges could require student vaccinations.
In short, Reiss said, they can, as long as they create an exemption for students who cannot take a vaccine or health or religious reasons.
One issue that is already being challenged, she said, is whether the emergency use authorization that cleared the COVID-19 vaccines for use in the U.S. is sufficient reason to have universities require them. In two states, the ‘emergency’ status of the vaccines is the basis of lawsuits filed by employees who were told to take them, she said.
“It’s going to increase the risk of litigation,” Reiss said, if universities require vaccination when the products remain under an emergency use designation. “Universities, some of them are going to go by what they did in the past,” she said, of decisions by colleges and universities to mandate other kinds of vaccines, such as measles, mumps and rubella. “A mandate is work. You don’t take on that work unless you have a reason.”
As for businesses, so far many say they plan to encourage, rather than require, vaccination of their employees.
Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island, based in Smithfield, which has more than 600 employees, will not require them to get vaccines for COVID-19, its CEO, Peter Marino, said.
“Each business is trying to assess how to handle returning to their operations,” he said. “I think businesses do have the legal authority to mandate vaccinations. The real question, is does that really meet the needs of their business? I think we can achieve our goals as an organization without having to mandate a vaccine. I’m comfortable that most folks will understand the need to be vaccinated for their own safety and their family’s safety, but for their colleague’s as well.”
Mary MacDonald is a staff writer for the PBN. Contact her at macdonald@PBN.com.
