University of Michigan Will Require Students & Employees to Get a Booster Shot for Winter Term 2022

Students and employees at three University of Michigan campuses are required to get a COVID-19 booster shot during the winter semester of 2022, the university has announced.

“U-M officials are urging university community members to get a booster shot as soon as possible and wherever the booster is available to them,” the university notes.

A booster shot has been required for all students, faculty, and staff on the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses, including Michigan Medicine, under a revised U-M vaccination policy. The university will impose the requirement in a bid to curb the spread of the COVID-19 cases in winter, Erudera.com reports.

The University of Michigan has also announced that the omicron variant is present on the Ann Arbor campus, and public health officials at the campus are working on new strategies to reduce the spread of it.

According to the university, Ann Arbor campus community members can receive booster shots until February 4, 2022, or as soon as they become eligible based on their individual vaccination schedule.

In addition to booster shots, the university has encouraged all community members to continue wearing masks while indoors and perform COVID-19 tests before leaving campus. It also advised the latter to quarantine immediately in case they develop COVID-19 symptoms.

The associate vice president for student life and director of the Campus Health Response Committee, Robert Ernst, said that the current mitigation strategies have enabled successful in-person education in the fall despite the COVID-19 pandemic.  

“From the high vaccination rate and required weekly testing for those who are not fully vaccinated, layered on top of indoor masking, prompt case investigation and contact tracing and our wastewater surveillance program, we’ve maintained an environment on campus that has allowed our community to return to many of the pre-pandemic experiences that were missed in 2020,” Ernst said.

In addition to the University of Michigan, more than 20 other higher education institutions across the United States require students, faculty, and staff to receive COVID-19 vaccine booster shots before the spring term due to the spread of the Omicron COVID-19 variant.

Wesleyan University in Connecticut was among the first colleges to require COVID-19 booster shots for students, staff, and faculty who will be present on campus in spring term 2022.

Syracuse University has also announced that it will require all eligible students and employees to receive a booster shot before the spring semester begins.

Due to the spread of the Omicron variant, one of the top universities in the United States, Harvard University, has announced it will move to remote learning again for the first three weeks of January.