Rutgers COVID-19 Shot Mandate Remains After Court Rules ‘No Fundamental Right to Refuse Vaccination’

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A landmark court ruling upheld that students of Rutgers University have no right to refuse the COVID-19 shot.

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit dismissed a lawsuit filed by a group of students who raised constitutional challenges against the school’s policy mandating that all students and employees be required to take the COVID-19 shot.

“Rutgers had to decide in real time, on a changing landscape of executive pronouncements and medical judgments, how to sustain its educational mission while protecting the safety of its student body,” read the majority judgment. “Students had to choose whether to vaccinate and resume in-person or to decline and proceed masked (for exempt students) or remotely or elsewhere (for non-exempt students). None of these options were ideal, and no doubt they created hardship for many.”

“That choice may have been difficult,” the court continued. “But there is no unqualified right to decide whether to ‘accept or refuse’ an Emergency Use Authorization product without consequence.”

“Nor is there an unqualified right to attend a university – let alone the university of one’s choice – without conditions.”

The court added, “As federal courts have uniformly held, there is no fundamental right to refuse vaccination.”

The ruling is only the latest blow for university students who claim their right to medical autonomy has been violated. More than a dozen students filed the federal lawsuit against Rutgers after the university first mandated students get the COVID-19 shot in 2021, arguing that the school’s requirement violated their right to medical privacy. A month later, a federal judge denied the student’s request for an injunction, and in 2022, a federal court in New Jersey dismissed the suit.

Rutgers is one of 68 universities still requiring students and staff to receive the shot to be enrolled for the upcoming fall semester. The school’s website currently states, “COVID-19 shots are required of students and employees unless granted a medical or religious exemption by the university.” Those who don’t show proof that they have had the shot will not be allowed to return for the first day of class on Sept. 6.

The site added that “face coverings are not required at the university but are welcomed.”

According to Lucia Sinatra, co-founder of No College Mandates, the ruling comes as another roadblock for health privacy advocates who believe an individual’s medical care should be a personal decision and not subject to coercion.

“This was a huge disappointment,” said Ms. Sinatra, who served as an advisor in the lawsuit. “How a federal court can rule that bodily autonomy is not a protected freedom or constitutional right is mind blowing to me. This is a politically driven decision coming from a judiciary that is largely corrupted.”

“The right to bodily autonomy is one of the most basic rights an individual has, and how a judge won’t defend that most basic of constitutional rights is just beyond scary,” she told The Epoch Times.

The past two years have seen the COVID-19 shots become mired in controversy. The original COVID-19 vaccines were taken by more than 80 percent of Americans after officials pledged that the shots would effectively prevent contraction and stop the spread of the disease.

However, once it was revealed that the shots didn’t work as promised, interest in the subsequent booster decreased dramatically.

The shots could also be attributed to widespread reports of adverse health outcomes believed to have been caused by the therapies. COVID-19 shots have been named the primary suspect in over 1.5 million adverse event reports, according to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database. The numbers could be even higher. An FDA-funded studyout of Harvard found that VAERS cases represent fewer than 1 percent of vaccine adverse events.

Despite the controversy, COVID-19 vaccine mandates continue to be in effect for students at 68 (including Rutgers) out of the top 800 colleges in the United States, according to recent data acquired by No College Mandates, which describes itself as a “group of concerned parents, doctors, nurses, professors, students, and other college stakeholders working towards the common goal of ending COVID-19 vaccine mandates.”

The student group that filed the lawsuit plans to appeal the ruling to the district court, according to Mr. Sinatra.

“The stakes couldn’t be greater,” said Ms. Sinatra. “This isn’t just about a single shot, it is about the right of medical autonomy for every individual in this country.”