The University of Virginia disenrolled 238 students just days before classes begin for bucking the institution’s COVID-19 injection mandate.
UVA first announced that it would require students hoping to return to campus for in-person learning to be fully vaccinated in May. At the time, students were instructed to upload “proof of vaccination” to an online portal “no later than July 1” or request exemption.
The students who did not show their vaccine passports to the university by the deadline were taken off of the fall enrollment list last week after reportedly “receiving multiple reminders via email, text, phone calls, calls to parents that they were out of compliance.”
Anyone who missed the deadline and was disenrolled but wants to continue his education with UVA must submit a COVID-19 shot card before Aug. 25 to re-enroll and join fall classes, the university said. Students who do not agree with this mandate and do not have an exemption are not welcome back on campus until they do so.
While UVA spokesman Brian Coy told The Virginian-Pilot that the university believed “a good number” of the students who were removed from the enrollment list “may not have been planning to return to the University this fall at all,” at least 49 of these Cavaliers were registered to take classes in the fall semester which begins Tuesday, Aug. 24.
Although approximately 96.6 percent of UVA students have received full doses of a COVID-19 injection, the university is requiring any students who were approved for religious or medical exemptions from the novel medical treatments to take weekly COVID-19 tests and wear masks indoors and outdoors on campus.
While Virginia data shows COVID-19 deaths in people younger than 30 in the state are rare, even students who are considered fully vaccinated against the virus must comply with the university’s “temporary masking policy” that also requires everyone to wear a face-covering on campus due to “the threat the [delta] variant poses.”
