Harvard University shield
The University announced today that Harvard, like at least a couple of hundred other institutions of higher education (see
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s list here), will require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to return to campus this fall.
President Lawrence S. Bacow, Provost Alan M. Garber, Executive Vice President Katie Lapp, and Giang T. Nguyen, executive director of Harvard University Health Services, wrote, “We hope to be able to offer a less restricted, robust on-campus experience for all our students this fall,” assuming rates of infection can be kept low. That will require continued regular coronavirus testing, with details on the regimen forthcoming.
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Photograph courtesy of Harvard Medical School
Harvard is an extraordinary place. Decades before the current pandemic began, basic research conducted at the University had laid the foundations for understanding the coronavirus family of viruses, whose spiked, crown-like appearance inspired the name. When the SARS pandemic erupted in 2002, Harvard researchers were the first to identify the receptor the virus used to enter human cells, and to predict the epidemiological trajectory of its spread. The value of such knowledge, which guides public-health measures that have already saved countless lives, and the development of vaccines and therapeutics that will save countless more, is hard to assess most of the time until suddenly, unexpectedly, it proves invaluable.