‘Jabs for lectures’ is a dangerous policy
Making vaccinations mandatory for students is impractical, illiberal and discriminatory.
One side effect of Covid has gone unreported: it kills off your moral compass. At least this would explain Boris Johnson’s insistence that university students will have to be fully vaccinated to attend lectures or stay in halls of residence. Said to be ‘raging’ at low rates of vaccination among young adults, and with no discernible stampede to the clinics after his ‘Freedom Day’ threat of vaccine passports to enter nightclubs, Johnson has upped the ante with a jabs-for-lectures mandate. Never before has higher education been made conditional upon medical status.
There are close to 2.5million students in the UK. That is a lot of young adults who will now be faced with a stark choice: get jabbed or abandon plans for university. For decades, teenagers have been taught that going to university is the only route to employment, prosperity and even adulthood. When all this comes to depend on having a vaccine, the notion of ‘informed consent’ is rendered meaningless. If this proposal goes ahead, then one of the first lessons school-leavers will learn is that medical decisions are not a matter of personal choice, but subject to state coercion.