A third Victorian university has made vaccination a condition of entry onto campus, as Australian sentiment shifts behind mandatory inoculation – in the Covid-ravaged south-eastern states, at any rate.
The University of Melbourne will require students, staff, contractors and other visitors to its campus to be fully vaccinated from 5 November. Cross-town Monash University has adopted the same deadline, offering retail vouchers as a sweetener for immunised staff and students.
The Victorian government has nominated 5 November as the date when on-campus learning can resume for fully vaccinated students. It is expected that 80 per cent of eligible Victorians will have received two injections by then.
La Trobe University will require people on campus to be fully vaccinated from December. Deakin University vice-chancellor Iain Martin has also signalled his support for mandatory vaccination.
Major New South Wales institutions are also considering whether to make immunisation obligatory for students, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, with the University of Sydney and UNSW Sydney surveying staff and students on the subject.
A Monash survey in early September uncovered strong support for compulsory immunisation, with 88 per cent of staff and student respondents indicating that it would make them “more comfortable” on campus. Less than 5 per cent of students and 4 per cent of staff reported that they had no plans to be vaccinated.
A survey of independent colleges also revealed solid support for mandatory jabs, with 77 per cent of the 200-plus institutional respondents supporting compulsory vaccination of their workforces. Support was strongest in the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria and New South Wales, where large swathes of the population are in lockdown.
The Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia, which conducted the survey, said independent colleges were keen to embrace a “living with Covid” environment where prolonged lockdowns would be a “thing of the past”.
Melbourne said exemptions to its immunisation requirement would apply to people who were ineligible for jabs or unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons. Vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell promised “reasonable and practical” arrangements for such people.
He said that vaccination requirements were increasingly a precondition of access to services “across a range of sectors”, with immunisation already mandatory in some university settings. “Vaccination will allow members of our community to move seamlessly between activities on our campuses and…broader society,” Professor Maskell told staff and students.
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