After a pandemic-disrupted year of safety measures and Zoom lectures, the promise of coronavirus vaccines offered U.S. universities a shot at normalcy this fall. The virus has not been wiped completely from campuses, but major outbreaks have so far been rare.
The arrival of flu season, however, poses an added challenge.
Colleges are ideal breeding grounds for viruses, and some public health experts are predicting that this year’s flu season will be more severe than the last. To guard against outbreaks, a number of major universities are going beyond their usual autumn flu vaccine pushes — and enacting mandates.
At Johns Hopkins University, which will enforce flu vaccine mandates for students, faculty and staff alike, one prime concern was that if a flu outbreak were to hit campus, students with flu symptoms could mistake it for covid-19 and overwhelm testing sites.
“Making the influenza vaccine mandatory was, I would say, a straightforward decision based on all of those considerations,” said Stephen Gange, the university’s executive vice provost for academic affairs and a professor in its Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I think people see the value in trying to control the flu, given that we’re still in a high level of covid transmission.”
Health experts expected the confluence of the coronavirus and flu to spur a “twindemic” — severe outbreaks of the two viruses at once — last year.
But “very few people had the flu last year, because everybody was home trying to avoid covid and everybody was wearing a mask,” explained Ranit Mishori, Georgetown University’s chief public health officer. Millions of people who avoided exposure to the flu last year may have weakened immunity, Mishori said, because their bodies did not create the barriers needed to fight the virus.
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