5 Georgia colleges in August upholding COVID-19 vaccine requirements despite national rollback

Kathryn McClymond, Interim President, Oglethorpe University | Oglethorpe University

By Peach Tree Times

Sep 30, 2023

There are still five colleges in Georgia that continue to require COVID-19 vaccinations for students to attend classes by August.

Updated data from Better Colleges showed five Georgia colleges in August required a COVID-19 vaccine to be on-campus, in residence, or enrolled in certain programs.

At the same time, reports from the educational awareness group No College Mandates showed that 90% of colleges by August had rolled back their COVID-19 mandates.

“Is it any wonder college enrollment is down?” No College Mandates co-founder Lucia Sinatra wrote in a February 2023 opinion piece.

“The graduating class of 2023 has hardly known the freedoms older generations enjoyed — exuberant and unrestricted socializing, in-person intellectual debates and, of course, the freedom to choose whether to take an experimental medical intervention,” she wrote with Yasmina Palumbo of the pandemic response accountability group Restore Childhood.

Ian Miller with the news organization Outkick claimed the schools still requiring COVID-19 vaccines were implementing a “historically indefensible policy” that showed how “progressive administrators are more concerned with ideological virtue signaling than following science.”

The public health emergency about COVID-19 was officially closed by the CDC in May, 2023.

Georgia Schools Continuing to Implement a COVID-19 Mandate in August