Thread by @rcallimachi

1. More than 400 universities have announced students will not be able to enroll next fall if they haven't been vaccinated for Covid-19. A look at a map of where they are located shows that 92% of these colleges are in states that voted for Biden:
nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/…

2. A tracker compiled by @chronicle, which is updated every day, shows that just 34 colleges out of 404 are in states that voted for Donald Trump in the last election: chronicle.com/blogs/live-cor…

3. The electoral map serves as a near exact proxy of which colleges have imposed the vaccine requirement, speaking to our divided politics and to how politicized the pandemic has become. To understand what was happening I interviewed 2 dozen university leaders, like Katie Conboy

4. All three vaccines available in the US are under emergency-use authorization, creating a legal hurdle. Many colleges that want to impose the vaccine are adding a caveat: The requirement goes into effect as soon as one of the three gets FDA approval. See the UC system statement

5. Campus leaders explained to me that the caveat is in effect a formality. They expect one of the three vaccines to be approved before the fall. In states that voted for Trump, the lack of FDA approval is the main argument I heard for not imposing it:

6. In red states, the colleges that are requiring it are mostly private, elite schools like Notre Dame or Duke Universities. Their student bodies are national. And because they are private, the schools have more maneuverability. It's a different story for public schools

7. College presidents in states that voted for Trump spoke of being between a rock & a hard place: They want to impose the vaccine to try to return to normal, but they fear losing funding from Republican-controlled legislatures. They also fear losing enrollment:

8. Those that are breaking with the pack and requiring the vaccine are modeling their mandate on those already in place for other childhood vaccines, like MMR. Students can request an exemption. The difference? The MMR and flu vaccines are FDA-approved. The Covid one is not -yet

9. Most of the major, name-brand schools have already announced their position on the vaccine mandate, but the 404 that have announced so far are only 10 percent of the 4000+ colleges in the United States. Political analysts expect that the blue-red divide will persist:

10. If it does indeed persist, we could see a divide next fall between campuses like Notre Dame, where already 90% of students are vaccinated and where many Covid restrictions have been lifted. Schools where life goes back to how we knew it before the pandemic vs those that don't

11. A flavor of how divisive this issue is in the comments to this thread: