St. Olaf and Carleton Colleges Attempt to Coerce Students and Employees Who Dare to Make Their Own Medical Decisions

Coercion is key for Minnesota’s St. Olaf and Carleton colleges and will be the tool used to get students and employees to be injected against their will with the experimental COVID-19 vaccine gene therapy.  Going against longstanding Minnesota, national, and international law that protects all citizens’ inalienable right of prior consent and bodily autonomy before participating in a medical intervention or treatment, these once-revered academic institutions are attempting to bend the will of their brilliant students and employees by telling them to go home if they dare to decline the experimental Covid vaccine gene therapy injections. 

Data from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System showed 329,021 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines, (these vaccines are only authorized for experimental use), including 5,888 deaths and 28,441 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and June 4, 2021.  Yet St. Olaf and Carleton are choosing to act in lock-step with federal agencies regarding the highly controversial vaccines.  In so doing, the institutions are choosing to ignore Minnesota’s own Right to Refuse law protecting the rights of citizens during an emergency to decline medical interventions (MN Stat. § 12.39) and the principle of voluntary consent to medical treatments enshrined in American case law; “[n]o right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded, by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others…” Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, 497 U.S. 261 (1990).

Coercion is a powerful weapon in times of stress.  Rather than respecting Minnesota’s regular straightforward student vaccine policy for K-12 students that requires a notarized statement from parents who wish to decline vaccines for their children based upon their conscientiously-held beliefs, St. Olaf instead will be requiring those who wish to decline the injections to participate in the elaborate federally-designed employment process of obtaining a “religious accommodation”.  It requires both students and employees to formally request an accommodation, then requires them to provide documentation regarding religious beliefs to a college committee for review and assessment.  The St. Olaf committee is made up of five people: Vice President for Human Resources, Leslie Moore; Associate Dean of Students for Residence Life, Pamela McDowell; Associate Director of Disability, Access, and Technology Support, Laura Knobel-Piehl; Assistant Director of Disability and Access Services, Joe Young; and College Ministry Staff.   The request may or may not be accepted.  If the review is accepted then the institution may further require a student or employee to abide by additional policies for persons choosing not to be vaccinated (such as masking, or off-campus living, etc.).

Most post-secondary institutions in Minnesota protect the right of students and employees to make their own medical decisions.  The Star Tribune reports that “The Minnesota State system’s 30 community colleges and seven universities are only encouraging vaccination, as are most other private colleges in the state.”  St Thomas University, Minnesota’s largest private college, announced it will not require students and employees to be vaccinated.  But a small number of other private institutions have chosen to require the controversial vaccines including Macalester College, Gustavus Adolphus College and the Mitchell Hamline School of Law. 

The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights states “Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.”  The principle of voluntary consent is recognized internationally under the World Medical Association Declaration on the Rights of the Patient, the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and the Nuremberg Code, as a human right.

When our most revered institutions use coercion toward their esteemed students and employees regarding such an important human right as health freedom, and cast off the most deeply-held American value of personal liberty and autonomy, we are in grave danger of losing America itself.

Please Take Action:  We encourage you to stand up for health freedom and liberty rights by writing a letter to these institutions urging them to withdraw their requirement for students and employees to receive vaccines, or at the very least, provide straightforward exemptions based upon conscientiously-held beliefs reflecting Minnesota’s legal and ethical policies regarding vaccines.