MIT hosts COVID-19 policy debate

Will other schools follow?

Since the start of the pandemic, I have written 200 op-eds on COVID-19 policy and published 20+ peer reviewed articles. I was opposed to school closure, masking kids, vaccine mandates, especially for young men in college who already had COVID-19, and took on many other controversial topics. Yet, from 2020-2022, I was not asked to debate these topics at any university. To my knowledge, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Harvard and many other elite institutes held 0 debates on these consequential policy issues. The NIH director specifically tried to stifle debate on lockdowns, rather than listen to the thousands of scientists who opposed them.

As of today, I have been invited to just 2 debates. In December 2023, at UCSF, I debated my colleague, George Rutherford, in front of an epidemiology audience on 2 propositions: Should you test for COVID-19 if you feel sick? Should you get a fall booster? It was spirited and interesting.

This week I am back from MIT, where I debated: Vaccine mandates, visitor restrictions and masking policy. The audience was largely undergraduates at MIT.

The most contentious part of the debate was MIT’s own COVID-19 vaccination mandate, and I think the students appreciated hearing both sides.

In the 45 min Q and A, the entire audience had their hands up. It was the most engaged I had seen a crowd. Afterwards, dozens of students talked to me at the reception.

Kudos to MIT for hosting the debate, but my question is: When will more universities muster up the courage?

It's clear students are smart enough to handle these topics. It's clear people are interested. It's clear that this is the role of universities, to have debates on the most substantive issues of our day. And yet, there are very few such debates.

I encourage the readers of Sensible Medicine who work at universities to email your chair and to request a Grand Rounds on controversial COVID-19 policy. And if you run a conference series then what's stopping you?

Four years after the pandemic began, we should be having open conversations about the annual fall booster or the ongoing mask mandates at many centers.