Injecting science and sanity into public health policies at Columbia University
A running update on efforts to lift and prevent more COVID vaccine and booster mandates and to update university recommendations to accurately reflect global data on vaccine risks and benefits
Background
In April, 2021, Columbia University (CU) along with many other colleges and universities in the country, mandated COVID vaccines for all students, faculty and staff who are present on campus. In December, 2021, I contacted the university COVID response director to share vaccine safety research and global policy updates including Moderna vaccine restrictions for young adult males in Nordic countries and to notify her of my presentation at the university’s COVID symposium on age-stratified risk-benefit analysis using data-driven vaccine mortality risk estimates derived from publicly available US CDC data. She responded and forwarded my email to other public health members of the university COVID task force. However, CU still mandated a 3rd (1st booster) dose in December, 2021.
To my surprise, as NYC lifted its indoor vaccine mandates in March, 2022, the following month, CU announced it would keep its 1st booster mandate for all incoming students for the Fall, 2022 semester. In addition, as of July, 2022, CU still has not updated its vaccine policy, guidance and recommendations to reflect the most recent data on COVID vaccines’ and boosters’ (limited) effectiveness, especially in relation to their increasingly apparent and concerning safety signals such as unacceptably high rates of myocarditis in young adult males and the risk of vaccine-enhanced COVID-19 disease via antibody dependent enhancement. For example, the CU FAQ on COVID vaccine safety does not mention the latter two risks. It only mentions the risk of thrombosis (blood clotting) with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) (low blood platelets) associated with J&J vaccine, even though the FDA’s own analysis suggests that vaccine myocarditis occurs in late teenage males at a rate that is about 20x higher than the J&J TTS risk in women under 50 that is quoted in the CU FAQ (200 vs. 7 cases per 1M doses). Moreover, the FDA’s own risk-benefit analysis predicted a 2nd dose of the Pfizer vaccine would cause between 4-20x more cases of myocarditis than the estimated number “COVID-associated” hospitalizations prevented in males ages 16-17 yrs old (the author wins a gold medal in mental gymnastics for recommending the booster in spite of these data!).
Petition letter
It became clear that our COVID task force needed to see more global data on why the mandates and their FAQ are sorely misguided. In July, I drafted a comprehensive and well-sourced letter with over 140 citations to peer-reviewed studies, preprints and articles showing why the mandates are misguided for the following four reasons: A) vaccine risks outweigh their benefits, especially in young adults who are the majority facing the mandates; B) vaccination does not measurably reduce transmission; C) vaccination is unnecessary, and more risky, in people with prior infection or vaccination; and D) publications that claim favorable risk-benefit profiles are untrustworthy and unreliable because their raw data are inaccessible, their methods are not rigorous, or their claims are not backed by supporting data.
The letter was received by the CU president’s office on Tuesday, August 2nd. As per our request in the letter, CU responded on Thursday of that week by email and acknowledged receipt of the letter later that week (see below section Correspondence with CU leadership). The next day, I replied and expressed my appreciation for their acknowledgment, and asked them to relay the committee’s overall feedback to the document and to arrange a meeting with them after they had a chance to review it, so that I could present, debate and discuss the data with them in real-time. However, I never received a response to my request.
Later in August, I began circulating a digital version of the petition letter to other CU members. Below is a PDF version of the email (feel free to use as a template in case you would like to conduct a similar email campaign at your own college or university).
Correspondence with CU leadership
Our first priority with the petition letter is to ensure CU does not mandate the fall bivalent booster that was recently authorized and recommended by the FDA and CDC. In August, I circulated the petition letter among CU faculty and staff. This garnered an initial round of signatures from over 250 CU members including junior faculty and full professors in medicine, infectious disease, STEM and other quantitative fields such as business and risk management. On September 5th, I asked the COVID policy decision makers whether they plan to mandate the bivalent booster in late fall or winter. As of Friday, September 23rd, we have not yet heard back. See below for the full email correspondence with CU leadership since they received our hard copy letter on August 2nd.
How to help our efforts
If you are affiliated with a university and you support lifting university mandates and would like to urge them to update their FAQs to accurately reflect available data on vaccine benefits and risks, please sign our petition letter using this petition form. All signatories along with their degree, title/position and institution will appear in a table at the bottom of the letter.
You can also download a fillable PDF version of the letter that is hosted on the No College Mandates website and snail-mail and/or email it to a college or university that is still mandating or recommending vaccines or boosters. Please also support and subscribe to nocollegemandates.com and also this Substack.
About the author
Spiro P. Pantazatos, PhD
Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology
Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Profile pages: ResearchGate and CUIMC faculty profile.
Email: spiropan [at] gmail.com (preferable) or spp2101 [at] columbia.edu
Thank you Spiro for these resources and for your letter to Fordham University's new BIVALENT REQUIREMENT of all students and employees.
Fordham University is the ONLY university in New York State requiring the new bivalent, and one of only about 15 schools nationwide. We were informed of this new requirement 6 days ago by email.
To anyone reading this, please tag/message FordhamNYC to shine light on this unscientific requirement. Fordham students need all possible hands on deck to get the school to REVOKE this requirement before the Nov 1 deadline. Thank you!
Great Work Dr Pantazatos. I would like to visit with you and unable to reach you through the email that we contacted you last year. Your work is extremely important.
We (Thorp, Price and Deskevich et al) performed a retrospective cohort study using VAERS database from January 1, 1998 to June 30, 2022. The obstetrical complications after the COVID-19 vaccines were compared to those after Influenza vaccines. There were substantial increases in menstrual abnormalities, miscarriage, fetal malformations, fetal chromosomal abnormalities, fetal cystic hygroma, fetal growth restriction, fetal cardiac abnormalities, fetal cardiac arrhythmia, fetal cardiac arrest, placental thrombosis, fetal growth restriction, fetal vascular mal-perfusion, oligohydramnios, abnormalities of fetal surveillance and fetal deaths. All of these abnormalities were clinically and statistically significant and in fact were corroborated by multiple completely independent sources worldwide.
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202209.0430/v1