The Higher Education Vaccination Dilemma

As the calendar page turned and hope dawned, vaccinations became the next big discussion topic among Risk Managers and campus leaders. Join URMIA staffers Lou Drapeau and Gary Langsdale as they review the results of the latest URMIA survey about vaccination policies with Host Jenny Whittington, executive director at URMIA.

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Transcript

Jenny: Hello everyone this is Jenny Whittington, executive director of URMIA. Welcome to URMIA matters and Happy New Year to everyone. I am so pleased to have Lou Drapeau and Gary Langsdale with me today and we are going to talk about a hot topic for all of our members right now: vaccinations. So first of all Happy New Year, Lou. Did you have a nice celebration ringing in 2021?

Lou: I don't know if it was much of a celebration. It was pretty quiet.

Jenny: I get it. My motto is let’s just hope 2021 is better than 2020

Lou: Right

Jenny: And Happy New Year to you as well Gary, thanks for doing the podcast today from your new beach view, tell us all about that.

Gary: We’re spending January again on the redneck Riviera halfway between Mobile, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida so I'm happy to be on the beach today spending the beginning of the new year here, but still doing all URMIA stuff.

Jenny: I haven't experienced that yet but I have heard from our colleagues at URMIA that sometimes you show off your beach view, so I hope to see that in the coming weeks. Lou, I wanted to start with you. I know we, URMIA, here recently did a survey on vaccinations to our members because this topic has been brewing in the, I'd say the last at least month or maybe two months of 2020, so can you talk about the results of the survey?

Lou: Sure it's a request of several members and we created the survey, as you said, to determine what our member institutions were contemplating as regards mandating covid-19 vaccinations for students, faculty and staff, and on several of the questions, you know, we left an other category for responses that didn't necessarily fit into a yes or no answer and we got quite a bit of interesting information. So, do you want me to go through and say what the questions were and give a little feedback on each of them.

Jenny: Absolutely.

Lou:  and the kind of information that we got it? It was only a 6 question survey but we were, and we were really, the main thing was again to find out if people were going to be mandating that their students and employees take the vaccine. So question number one was do you mandate students to take the vaccine or will you recommend or strongly encourage that they do and that was one of the ones where we needed the answers for the open-ended answer and it has 22% of people said that yes they were going to mandate student take the vaccine 41% said no and then 37% had other answers and those broke down in a couple different ways eight of them or 20% said they were going to strongly recommend taking the vaccination and 10% said they were still trying to figure it out.

Jenny: That sounds about right.

Lou: So then we went to the next question, okay if you're not going to give it to the general student body will you mandate students who live in residential housing take the vaccine, and that was an important question cuz that's students living on campus as opposed to those just coming into the for the day for classes and again about 20% of the respondents said yes 50% said no and 30% had other answers and I was surprised at the number of people that responded that they had no residential housing so obviously that question doesn't really apply to them so I'm assuming those are like junior colleges and community colleges, stuff like that.

Jenny: Sure.

Lou: And then there was another 12.5% that still had not determined if they were going to make their residential housing students take it or not and then there were 5% that were going to recommend that the residential students take the vaccine.

Jenny: Yeah, that seems like a really important part of this puzzle, is students that are living really close together in group housing like that. It seems very important and I know I did read an article earlier today about incentivizing people to get their vaccinations, which we can talk about later but I thought that was an interesting, maybe I'm not sure about students exactly, but just the public in general. So go ahead with question thre

Lou: Alrighty, and then the next question, number three was will this also apply to employees unless they opt out for medical or religious exemption, and of course employees would include faculty and staff so 25% of the respondents said yes, 48% of the respondents said no and then there were about 27% I think in the other category and again 12.5% of those have not determined yet and then the other 12.5% said they would recommend or strongly encourage employees to to take it.

Jenny: Sure. 

Lou: And then question number four was have you already or do you plan to have an institutional policy on vaccines to specifically address COVID and 27% of the people said yes they were planning or would or do already have a plan to address covid and 73% did not and then we didn’t have an other category for that one. And then the next question, which I guess we'll have to wait and see how many of these we ultimately get. We said if the answer to the previous question was yes would you be willing to share this with the group and 38% said yes they would 62% said no but then again remember 73% said they weren’t ready to have a plan anyhow so we actually gained a little bit there and interestingly enough just a few minutes ago I saw on the dru website from University of Oregon that they've got people that are looking for people's plans for the vaccination surveys, so I'm going to keep my eye on that and see if maybe we can come up with a few extra that way so I'm hopefully, we’ll respond with once they've developed their plan they will respond to and then we'll have some that we can use as examples if other people need them if they're trying to draft their own plan and would like a model to use and then the last question was the really the open-ended one: do you have any additional information regarding the distribution of the covid vaccine you might be able to share at this time and actually the responses to that was several pages long and with all kinds of different answers and a lot of them had some interesting points and one person and of course we don't know who the individual respondents were but one person wrote an entire paragraph about the problems that they are running into injecting the vaccine, deciding how much vaccine they’ve got and who's going to get it first and the problems with keeping your refrigerator at -80 degrees and then having the people available because I guess you have to have a medical personnel, you have to wait for 20 minutes after they have the shot to make sure that they don't have some bad reaction to it and I guess they have people on hand with epipens just in case they do have a bad reaction and it’s not getting a flu shot, you stand there you get the flu shot and go back to work or go back to class or whatever you got to have people wait for 20 minutes so that's created some problems and of course there are some universities that have medical facilities so the medical facility people are getting their shots already and the students and the other faculty and staff aren't able to get them yet there were a whole bunch of discussion on topics like that also several people mentioned that they didn't think since the vaccine is in the experimental stage at this point that that would be one reason that they wouldn't want to mandate it. Some very interesting input into that last question.

Jenny: Yeah it's such a complicated topic overall and obviously a new topic for the majority of our membership. So, Gary I wanted to get you in here. What are your initial reactions to some of the survey results that Lou just went over?

Gary: It’s been very interesting, Jenny. In addition to this survey I, too have been reading a number of Articles, there’ve been a couple of webinars sponsored by law firms that have big employment practices. The conclusion that they have drawn so far in a soft way is that employers, they mandate the vaccine but they've got to have a good reason and then it's a question of which populations do you, for whom do you mandate it. Those who have contact with the public, those who have high-risk medical conditions and that has complications because you don't want to be asking people about their medical history, that sort of thing. So in part of the complication here is, particularly in response to the survey is because the vaccine is not yet widely available in particularly beyond the first high risk groups, the medical professionals, even the Student Health Center people might be eligible among the first people or if a university has its own ambulance crew they might be eligible. Beyond that there just isn't enough vaccine right now and it seems like it's going to be a number of months before it's available to get to the under 65 population, anyway, not that everybody who works for university has fits that mold but the general working public and then the students who are going to, because of their general youth are going to be the last ones to be eligible to receive a scarce vaccine as it becomes more available and so it it doesn't surprise me at all in fact I was somewhat surprised at the low number of people of Universities responding to the survey who said that they don't know yet. I thought it might be more because it seems to be changing regularly as the priorities are shifting, as the vaccine is or is not available and all those things are shifting. Another piece of information from these, the webinars and the articles that I've read is that although an employer might have the right to mandate the vaccine for employees, they have to do so in a way which avoids the perception of discrimination, Lou mentioned people who have religious or medical contraindications going back to the fundamental issue of asking your employees for their age, do they fit in the category where they’re eligible to be vaccinated right now, those are all issues that will at least give the perception of discrimination, in fact not actual and then when you get down to the the downside for the students in particular, employees can make an argument that if someone has a complication or a side effect it would be covered by workers comp but that's not yet settled in any of the states, alone all 50 states, but what about the potential legal liability, civil liability if you mandate it for your students and one of them has a complication or a side effect, so I can see a lot of people sitting on the fence and shifting in their chairs about whether to do this or not as we move forward so these are all going to be complications.

Lou: One of the things that I found interesting in the responses was that there were two of the schools that said they would not mandate the coronavirus vaccine but they mentioned that they do already mandate the flu vaccine and have for several years. I thought that was interesting also. There was also one that said that they were planning to mandate the covid-19 vaccine subject to having it available by the time the fall semester starts so that there's another monkey wrench in the works

Jenny: Well, I know we are working towards having at least a session or two during our Virtual Spring Conference and I'm sure vaccinations will be among the topics. I know, Gary, you were here specifically working on a panel, so I know the membership can look forward to hearing  more about that and then the institutional round tables that we’re doing at the last week of January I am sure this topic will be in full force there and we'll have more information, more current, because it does change every day with how the vaccine is getting out to people and I look forward to seeing a best practice that we can share with the membership because this is just such a moving target and everybody needs some answers here this is so important I daresay it is going to be part of returning us to some kind of normalcy in 2021 that we all so dearly look forward to.

Gary: This is going to be, you mentioned getting back to some semblance of normalcy, this will impact everything from travel by researchers looking to conduct their research, travel by students looking to have semester or short-term study abroad and other consequences of having or not having received a vaccine that would make one eligible to do all kinds of things going forward. It'll be fascinating to see how that plays out once the vaccine is more generally available I also wanted to say that some of the articles I've read recently about this they, even though they say an employer might mandate it, there were, there was a lot of encouragement giving to incentivize populations to get it, to would you make time off available for your employees if they have to go someplace to get the vaccine, would you make it a celebration kind of an atmosphere that woohoo this will help us to get more towards normalcy or some sort of a competition, schools academic institutions love competition. So can we see if our school can get more, a higher percentage of its students vaccinated before the other school does, our rivals. That would be interesting, too.

Jenny: Yeah I wonder.  I read one of the articles that included the incentives and I was thinking just from the private sector, really, like how could you really incentivize your employees, but all those things are good. Where a lot of health plans, health care plans now incentivise you to watch your weight and to get exercise, this is similar, and I remember when those first came out like how odd that seemed to me. I thought it was a unique, interesting idea but at the same time it put me out a little like, oh, you know, but it it makes good sense. The healthier we are, the less the costs are going to be. So it’ll be interesting to see how this comes out. Well any closing comments on the topic of vaccinations?

Lou: I think it’s going to be an interesting year from the standpoint of getting these vaccinations and it’s not going to be something that’s done within a couple of months so it'll be interesting to watch.

Jenny: Definitely. How about you

Lou: And get a shot too. 

Jenny: Yeah

Lou: Two shots

Gary: Two shots.

Jenny: My mother in law, she got scheduled today. I think we all are probably getting to know some people that are on the, getting the shots themselves beyond the healthcare workers, so it's a good sign.

Gary: It’s the right thing to do if you can, and I think a lot of people want to do it, I think that the timing of those who were skeptical because it was being rushed has passed and now people are more willing to accept that it is scientifically sound but there are still people who have medical contraindications that are subject to severe allergies, that sort of thing but I think a lot of people won't want to do it and it's just a question that, the one of the biggest issues will be the logistics of making this all happen in every college town and every hamlet around the country.

Jenny: Yeah, well that was interesting, I mean the students came back on campus here in Bloomington, they managed the testing beautifully but they had the infrastructure set up, it was well thought out so I know higher education can get this done, so thank you Gary and Lou for being my guests today. Welcome to all of our listeners to year two of the URMIA matters podcast. I do want to give a shout out that we are doing a webinar January 21st with our friend Terry Hartle and an update with, legislative update, on what the election means to higher education, so we’re all looking forward to that and I mentioned earlier in the podcast that we will be doing institutional roundtables the last week of January by size and we're also doing one for our affiliate members, so please check out our events calendar and everybody have a great day.