Dear President Amy Gutmann, Interim Provost Beth Winkelstein, and Senior Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli:

We, the undersigned, write to express our opposition to the University of Pennsylvania’s decision to mandate COVID-19 booster shots for all eligible students, faculty, post-docs, and staff effective January 31, 2022.

We are not anti-vaccination or anti-booster. In fact, many of us are vaccinated and boosted. We are pro-bodily autonomy and vaccine democracy, and support the right of Penn community members to make their own medical choices.

The University’s own data demonstrates that Penn’s campus is extremely well protected against severe illness and death from COVID-19. 96% of the student body, both graduate and undergraduate, is fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in addition to 97% of faculty and staff. Many members of the Penn community have voluntarily elected to receive booster shots. Still others have acquired even more robust immunity from a previous COVID-19 exposure or infection on top of vaccination.

According to the CDC, anyone with an Omicron infection, regardless of vaccination status, can spread COVID-19 to others. Despite extremely high vaccination rates, the already existing requirement that students be fully vaccinated, and the University’s decision to move classes online for the beginning of the semester, Penn itself experienced record high campus positivity rates of 17.7% and 13.5% for COVID-19 in the first weeks of January 2022.

This data suggests that the moral and public health justification for mandates—to stop the spread of COVID-19—no longer holds. The WHO raises the additional ethical concern that boosting in rich countries prevents poor countries from providing even initial vaccinations to large swathes of their citizens. Booster mandates like Penn’s are directly complicit in this social injustice and are an affront to global vaccine democracy.

Booster shots themselves pose known safety risks. For men aged 16-29, the rate of vaccine-induced heart inflammation has been estimated at 10.69 in 100,000 by research published in the New England Journal of Medicine. For men aged 16-17, the FDA estimates the rate of vaccine-induced heart inflammation at 7.15 in 100,000. In light of this data, it is not surprising that the FDA’s expert advisory panel overwhelmingly rejected the universal recommendation of COVID-19 vaccine booster shots, voting 16-2 against the measure.

Professor of Vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine and Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Dr. Paul Offit, has argued against boosters for all. Offit warns that “expanding eligibility and mandates to boosters could actually hurt our overall efforts to protect the public from COVID-19” and suggests, instead, that boosters be reserved for the most vulnerable members of the population.  

The scientific understanding of booster vaccine efficacy against the milder and more transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19 is still preliminary. Most concerning is the potentially short duration of the protection provided by the booster. A recent report released by the UK Health Security Agency found that 10 weeks after administration, booster vaccination effectiveness had fallen from around 70% to around 45%. The preliminary nature of the data on booster vaccines should prompt caution and humility in the University’s response to the evolving situation, not the knee-jerk imposition of mandates.

Penn’s booster mandate flouts the warnings against universal boosting from both the FDA and one of Penn’s own most esteemed vaccine experts. What’s more, the University has communicated neither the data on booster efficacy, nor risks of heart inflammation from booster vaccination, nor the extremely low risk that its campus community faces from COVID-19. The policy for religious and medical exemption, while welcomed, does not recognize the myriad of other reasons why members of the Penn community may not want to receive a booster shot. By substituting mandates for scientific evidence and rational debate, Penn threatens not only the right to bodily autonomy, but also the core values of a liberal education.

If “laws without morals are useless,” as Penn’s own motto states, the University should consider our opposition to its booster mandate in good faith. The moral rationale for the mandates was grounded in the assumption that vaccination stops the spread of COVID-19, but the Omicron variant has demonstrated that this assumption was false. In light of this reality, those who do not wish to receive a novel vaccine against their will should not be coerced to do so.

You have a choice, President Amy Gutmann, Interim Provost Beth Winkelstein, Senior Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli: will you safeguard Penn’s reputation as a morally guided institution which respects the right of its members to make informed medical decisions, or will you continue to impose booster mandates without regard for the ethical objections of your own community?

We demand that the University of Pennsylvania’s booster mandate be revoked immediately.