Lynchburg Reporter

Sweet Briar College is the only college in Virginia that requires students to have a COVID-19 vaccine, despite more than 90% of colleges dropping vaccine mandates by August.

Updated data from Better Colleges showed Sweet Briar College is the only Virginia college in August requiring a COVID-19 vaccine to be on-campus, in residence, or attend specific programs during the 2023-24 school year.

At the same time, reporting from the educational awareness group No College Mandates showed that 90% of U.S. colleges by August had rolled back their COVID-19 mandates.

“Is it any wonder college enrollment is down?” No College Mandates co-founder Lucia Sinatra wrote in a February 2023 opinion piece.

“The graduating class of 2023 has hardly known the freedoms older generations enjoyed — exuberant and unrestricted socializing, in-person intellectual debates and, of course, the freedom to choose whether to take an experimental medical intervention,” she wrote with Yasmina Palumbo of the pandemic response accountability group Restore Childhood.

Ian Miller with the news organization Outkick claimed the schools still requiring COVID-19 vaccines were implementing a “historically indefensible policy” that showed how “progressive administrators are more concerned with ideological virtue signaling than following science.”

The public health emergency about COVID-19 was officially closed by the CDC in May, 2023.

School Name	City
Sweet Briar College	Sweet Briar