Students and faculty at Maryland universities must be vaccinated against the coronavirus upon returning to campuses in the fall, the system’s top official said Friday.
While the system will allow for medical and religious exemptions, it will generally require that students, faculty, and staff be vaccinated as a condition of coming on campus, University System of Maryland Chancellor Jay Perman said.
“I’m convinced that the risk of doing too little to contain COVID on campus this fall is far greater than the risk of doing too much,” Perman said in a statement.
Perman pointed specifically to the spread of the U.K. virus variant among young people as a motivating factor. The University of Maryland School of Medicine is seeing 10% of positive COVID-19 samples on its campus, and 30% to 40% are the U.K. variant of the virus, according to Perman.
“We have about 15,000 students living on campus right now. Come fall, we expect more than double that number,” Perman said. “This changes our calculus. Containing COVID spread with that kind of campus density requires much more serious intervention, and that means vaccination.”
“Mandating a COVID vaccine is the most effective strategy we have, especially as we try to reach herd immunity,” he added.
The system will continue to require pre-arrival COVID-19 testing for those coming on campus in the fall and will perform surveillance testing, Perman said.
Prior to Perman’s announcement, the University of California and California State University systems said Thursday that they intend to require COVID-19 vaccinations across their 33 combined campuses in the fall.
“We are announcing now so that students and employees have time to receive a vaccination,” CSU spokeswoman Toni Molle told the Associated Press.
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Vaccinations across the United States continue to creep upward, even as administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine remains on hold. Almost 41% of the total population had received at least one vaccine dose, and 26.9% was fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
