Insanity continues for healthcare students being forced to comply with mandates

Lucia Sinatra didn’t set out to lead a movement. A mother of two, she was preparing her kids for college when she sensed something deeply wrong. “We just didn’t see it happening — people weren’t dying,” she recalled. “But the panic kept growing.” By summer 2021, over a thousand U.S. colleges had issued vaccine mandates. Young, healthy students — some of whom had already recovered from COVID — were told: get the shot, or stay home.

For Sinatra, that crossed a line. “Informed consent and medical freedom are always the right thing. Always.” She began organizing. Rutgers had just declared that students must be vaccinated to attend. Harvard followed with near-impenetrable exemption policies. “These mandates were never about health — they were about control,” she said. “Students had to disenroll. Careers were ruined, lives were ruined.”

When Dartmouth, her son’s chosen college, implemented its policy, she responded with fire: “If you take this out on my son, I will rain down upon you with a wrath so great…” They didn’t. He graduated, unvaccinated, with no discrimination. But Lucia became persona non grata. “Eventually, they told me not to come to campus,” she said. “They blocked my emails.”

She founded No College Mandates — a hub for exemption help, legal guidance, and raw data. “I can’t come up with a legal rationale (for colleges’ mandating healthy kids’ getting a vaccine for a coronavirus illness which is no danger for their age group),” she said. “There is no science behind it.” Her site’s most visited resource? A spreadsheet of the 300+ colleges that never mandated COVID-19 shots. “If I had a nickel for every parent who told me they picked a school from that list…”

And yet, mandates persist. Not for undergrads anymore, but for healthcare students — future nurses, dentists, even doctors. “Hospitals are treating students like they’re dirty. It’s insane,” she said. In one of the most absurd reversals of public health logic, the healthiest among us remain barred from clinical rotations unless they accept an outdated vaccine. “You can be a fully trained adult, have had COVID three times, and still be denied entry into a hospital rotation,” she said. “It’s madness.”

I reference my “Is it Time to Accept That Omicron is not COVID-19?“, from 2022, based on which I compare “ANCESTRAL” SARS-CoV-2 and the subsequent “Greek letter” variants of concern  (alpha, beta, Delta) to the Baldwin family.

Even if we stipulate “that original virus was Alec Baldwin (the most dangerous of the four actor brothers), we’re now at Haley Baldwin (i.e., omicron); so mild it’s practically unrelated. But they’re still pushing the Alec Baldwin vaccine.”

Lucia agreed. “Nobody knows anybody who died, yet we heard on TV that the world was ending.” And she paid a price. “I lost friends. I got canceled from college forums,” she said. “But I’m not very good at staying silent or keeping my mouth shut — especially in the face of injustice.”

Despite years of struggle, there’s been no reckoning. “Nobody’s apologized,” she said. “They just moved on, pretending it never happened.” But she hasn’t. Not while mandates remain. “I’ve had to talk to trees just to breathe. That’s how crazy it got.”

Looking back, she has no regrets. “If I had to do it all again, I would — only louder, faster, earlier.” The principle remains simple. As I point out: “Our children lost the integrity and continuity of their sociable youth: ages 19, 20, and 21 — formative years — over a cold.”

While virtually no healthy children or young adults died from COVID-19, the public health response inflicted enormous structural harm on this cohort. From a Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) perspective, we didn’t shorten their lifespan — we degraded their prime functional years. Lucia Sinatra’s focus on college years underlines that ages “18”, “19,” “20,” and “21” are critical for intellectual development, relationship building, career launch, and independence.

For two to three years, this cohort was locked out of campuses, labs, sports, internships, study abroad programs, and social life — essential ingredients of higher education. The cost wasn’t mortality, but the erosion of maturity and opportunity. These were years they will not get back. And it was even worse for those younger and more crucial stages of development. Arguably, whatever gains Big Public Health made via diminishing cigarettes and warning about obesity were lost in a numerical sense, logistically – by lashing out at the young cohort to burnish false safety precepts for others, or for its co-runner (and possible partner in crime) Big Pharma, via Big Vaccines.

Join us at 5 pm ET weekdays on America Out Loud Talk Radio. Listen on iHeart Radio, our world-class media player, or our free apps on Apple, Android, or Alexa. Discover all the episodes on podcast networks, i.e., Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, Stitcher, and iHeart. You’ll find them the day after they air on talk radio, available on podcast. Extraordinary voices for extraordinary times.