COVID-19 Vaccines; Should LBCC Mandate for In-Person Students and Faculty? Braver Angels Teams up with LB's Civil Discourse to Host a Lively Debate on the Topic.
The year 2020 was difficult for a lot of us. There was a global pandemic in which, globally, over 246 million people died of the COVID-19 virus. On May 14th of this year, the vaccine for the virus was approved to be administered to people 12 years and older. By the month of October, over 3.8 billion people worldwide have been vaccinated. The CDC reported that as of Friday, the global 7-day infection average is above 68 thousand.
Last Tuesday, 501 nonprofit New York-based organization, Braver Angels, held a debate in conjunction with LBCC’s Civil Discourse Program over whether or not LB should mandate the COVID-19 vaccine. With 59 attendees, chairman of the debate Doug Sprei, a Communications and Campus Partnership Director at University of Rochester, calmly and collectively organized the passionate energy that filled the static air of the Zoom room, along with LB communications professor and Civil Discourse Program advisor, Mark Urista.
There were six speakers overall: two assenting speeches and two dissenting speeches. They each had exactly four minutes to speak and afterwards had an open forum for questions.
The first speaker, whose view was for the mandate, was LB student Nicholas May who is also a member of the Civil Discourse Program. May suggests that “the mandate will help make our campus safer, put our minds at ease, and move the pandemic towards the backburner.” He said, “pandemic fatigue is causing a lot of the stress around the virus, and getting people vaccinated as much and as soon as we will put this [the pandemic] to rest.”
Grace Georg, also a student, asks May if he is “including masks when he speaks about ‘reaching a finish line’ or is he trying to no longer have a [mask] mandate?" In response, May explains how he hopes that masks would become less necessary, but socially if someone did feel ill, he’d hope they continued to use masks.
The next speaker who was for the opposing side was LB student and member of the Civil Discourse Program, Cheyenne Rider. In her opening statement, Rider states, “being against a mandate doesn’t mean being against the vaccine,” and that “the vaccine is not the total solution, and it has become an extremely political issue.” Rider feels that “the choice to get vaccinated or not has now become an identity.”
She also stated that she believes LB has already been doing a good job at protecting it’s students by continuing the mask mandate, improving air quality and the HVAC systems, and providing us with free COVID testing. Rider believes that “forcing us to get vaccinated will create a false sense of security and will put people with religious and medical exemptions at more risk.”
She also emphasizes on the importance of education around the COVID-19 virus and the vaccine’s availability for those who want it: “I believe that education and not force is the best way to encourage vaccination.”
“I believe we should trust the science [behind vaccines], however, when it comes down to personal freedom, things get messy. This is America, and we have personal freedom,” said Rider.
Overall, many points during the debate were brought up by both sides of the argument. Sprei aided in keeping the conversation on track and timely, as well as respectful.
Stay tuned for an interview with chairman Doug Sprei.
