Yale requiring coronavirus vaccines for students to return

Yale University in New Haven, Conn., will require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before returning for in-person classes, the school said Monday.

In a letter to students and community members on Monday obtained by The Hill, the university’s president and provost stressed that students with religious objections would be exempt from the rule and added that the university would provide shots for those who were unable to be vaccinated over the spring or summer.

“There is abundant evidence of the vaccines’ effectiveness and growing confidence that vaccines will be widely available by early summer,” read the letter.

“Therefore, we are requiring all undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students who plan to be on campus to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 at the start of the fall 2021 semester. Additionally, we expect students who plan to study or work on campus this summer to be inoculated as soon as vaccinations are available to them,” it continued.

With Monday’s announcement, the Ivy League school joins a number of other U.S. universities to implement such a policy, including Cornell University, Rutgers University and Notre Dame University.

More than half a million COVID-19 cases in the U.S. have been linked to college campuses since the pandemic began, according to The New York Times.

Other universities are trying different methods to encourage inoculation among their student populations, such as Dickinson State University, which is offering students who get the vaccine exemptions from the school’s mask mandate.