Rutgers Is First School To Mandate Covid Vaccine For Students In Fall

AP: Rutgers To Require Students Be Vaccinated For Virus In Fall
Rutgers University will require that all students be vaccinated for the coronavirus before arriving for classes in the fall, the university said Thursday. The federal government’s assurance of vaccine supply for all Americans prompted Rutgers to make the decision, the university said in a statement. Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and executive vice president for health affairs, said the vaccine is the key “to the return of campus instruction and activities closer to what we were accustomed to before the pandemic.” (3/26)

USA Today/NorthJersey.com: Rutgers University First In US To Require COVID Vaccine For Students
A national organization that advocates for the health of college students said it was not aware of any other schools that require COVID vaccinations currently. "While we know it has been a topic of discussion among campus decision-makers, at this point in time, we are not aware of any other colleges or universities that are mandating the COVID-19 vaccine for students," Rachel Mack, a spokeswoman for the organization, the American College Health Association, said in an email. (Koloff, 3/26)

NBC News: Colleges Consider Requiring Covid Vaccinations For Students As Young Adults Drive Rise In Cases
Dickinson State University in North Dakota has a plan to encourage students to get their Covid-19 vaccinations: Students who have been fully vaccinated will receive a pin or a bracelet that will exempt them from the campuswide mask mandate, university administrators announced this week. The Dickinson vaccination incentive is voluntary. On Thursday, Rutgers University in New Jersey said it would require its more than 71,000 students to be vaccinated to attend fall classes on campus. Students who are studying only remotely won't have to be vaccinated, and there will be medical and religious exemptions, the university's president, Jonathan Holloway, said in a statement. (Syal, 3/26)

In related news about the vaccine rollout —

Axios: Amazon Plans To Vaccinate Frontline Workers In Fulfillment Centers 
Amazon plans to start vaccinating frontline employees in the next few weeks, starting with fulfillment centers in Missouri, Nevada and Kansas. Amazon and its subsidiary Whole Foods employed more than 1.3 million frontline workers in the U.S. between March and September last year. About 1.4% of those employees, more than 19,800, tested or were presumed positive, as of October 2020. (King, 3/25)

Boston Globe: As Many Workers Resist COVID-19 Vaccines, Calls Grow For State To Make Shots Mandatory 
Large pockets of first responders, front-line health workers, and other public-facing employees are so far refusing COVID-19 vaccination by the thousands in Massachusetts, prompting calls for state government and private employers to make getting shots a condition of hiring. Already, the president of one of the largest senior care operators in the state, Hebrew SeniorLife, has said its facilities plan to require COVID vaccines for new employees later this spring when shots are more widely available. And Attorney General Maura Healey earlier this week suggested that public safety employees, such as State Police and prison workers, should be expected to get the shots. (Stout and Weisman, 3/25)

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: Pharmacists Weigh Ordering Fewer Shots
In another sign of waning demand for coronavirus vaccines from eligible Arkansans, the head of the Arkansas Pharmacists Association said Thursday that a pharmacy group is considering reducing the amount of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech that it orders next week. Association CEO John Vinson said members of the Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Network have seen strong demand for the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but less for Pfizer's, which requires two shots spaced three weeks apart. (Davis, 3/26)

Modern Healthcare: Dialysis Centers To Get COVID-19 Vaccines For Patients
Dialysis centers will get thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses to vaccinate their patients and employees, the Biden administration announced Thursday. The doses will be provided directly to dialysis centers for patients who receive treatment at least three times a week. People on dialysis who contract COVID-19 are at greater risk for serious illness and death. In fact, a study published earlier this year in the Canadian Medical Journal Association found that patients undergoing long-term dialysis were more than five times likelier to be infected with COVID-19 and nearly four times as likely to die than the general population. (Hellmann, 3/25)

Stat: A User's Guide: How To Talk To Those Hesitant About The Covid-19 Vaccine
As the Covid vaccine supply increases throughout the U.S., the next hurdle to reaching herd immunity will be convincing those who are hesitant about vaccines to receive their shots. Surveys show Black and Hispanic adults are more likely to be “waiting to see” before they get a vaccine (but are also less likely to say they definitely won’t take one than white adults). Experts say the best way to tackle vaccine hesitancy is for people to have conversations with those they trust, whether a doctor, pastor, family member, or friend. (McFarling, 3/26)

KHN: How One State’s Public Health Defunding Led To Vaccination Chaos
Missourians have driven hours to find vaccines in rural counties — at least those with cars and the time. Tens of thousands of doses are waiting to be distributed, slowly being rolled out in a federal long-term care program. Waitlists are hundreds of thousands of people long. Black residents are getting left behind. Missouri’s rocky vaccine rollout places it among the bottom states nationwide, with 23.7% of the population vaccinated with at least one dosef as of Thursday, compared with the national average of 26.3%. If Missouri were on par with the national rate, that would be roughly equivalent to more than 162,000 additional people vaccinated, or almost the entire population of the city of Springfield. (Weber, 3/26)