Universities’ vaccine mandates helped stop virus deaths in their local counties, study says

Colleges with COVID-19 vaccine mandates helped save lives in their surrounding communities, a new national study says.

Over the first 13 weeks of the fall 2021 semester, the mandates reduced new COVID-19 cases by 339 per 100,000 county residents, according to the study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which was previously reported on by the Chronicle of Higher Education. New deaths were reduced by 5.4 per 100,000 residents, or about 5%, the study said.

That translates into about 7,300 lives saved in fall 2021, researchers said.

“Our results indicate that college vaccine mandates for COVID-19 have sizable positive effects on the health of the population living near colleges and universities,” researchers say in the 63-page report on the study.

» READ MORE: The vaccination debate on college campuses: A mandate or not? And for whom?

Whether to impose a vaccine mandate became a highly controversial decision for colleges trying to balance concerns of students and parents who wanted the freedom to make their own choices with those who wanted the protection backed by public health agencies. By fall 2021, nearly 700 colleges had made the decision to issue a mandate. The vaccines had become available less than a year earlier.

Pennsylvania’s state universities refrained from requiring the vaccine. So did Temple University until the City of Philadelphia mandated it, bringing Temple students under a requirement.

Other local public institutions took a different stance. Rutgers University became the first college in the region and possibly the nation to announce a vaccine mandate for students in March 2021. Many private colleges in the region, including the University of Pennsylvania, Villanova, and Drexel, early on announced they would require their students and in some cases staff to get the shots. Some universities also required students to get booster shots toward the beginning of last spring’s semester as cases were ramping up.

» READ MORE: Colleges weighing mandating booster shots as cases surge

Pennsylvania State University never issued a mandate but required students who didn’t have a vaccine to submit to rigorous testing. Former Penn State president Eric Barron said last spring that 92% of students got vaccinated anyway, and almost as many faculty and staff.

The study’s authors acknowledged that younger college students weren’t likely to face as adverse effects from the virus, but they still could spread it to others in the community who were at risk.

“One of the arguments for vaccinating a younger, generally healthier population would be this idea of protecting the rest of the community by limiting transmission from the college students to other members of the community,” Riley K. Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio, and coauthor of the paper, told the Chronicle. “That’s really what we were testing in this paper.”