The University of Waterloo’s dishonest and manipulative accommodations program
Designed to achieve “maximum compliance”
In an August 2021 memo entitled “Mandatory vaccination and attestation,” University of Waterloo (UW) president Vivek Goel told the community he wanted to “attain maximum compliance.”
Goel decided in advance that accommodations for “unvaccinated individuals” would be “rare.” Soon he upgraded “rare” to “unique.”
Over seven months, only 170 individuals were granted accommodations in UW’s community of about 45,000 people. That’s less than .4%.
UW told unsuccessful applicants that it was legally required to enforce its “vaccination requirement,” and that it was following instructions from Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Kieran Moore:
Were UW’s criteria and decisions to reject accommodations based on legal requirements or instructions from Moore?
No, they were not. To appreciate this, we need only read Moore’s actual instructions:
Two important points jump out.
First, Goel speaks of cases where one “cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons,” whereas Moore speaks only of a “medical reason” to not do so. Goel’s standard is much stricter than Moore’s. One can have a medical reason, even a decisive one, to not undergo a medical procedure but still be capable of undergoing it.
In fact, Goel’s standard is impossible. No matter how strong your medical reasons for not being injected, you still can be injected.
Second, Goel limits non-medical accommodations to “protected human rights grounds” (more specifically, protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code). By contrast, Moore’s instructions explicitly envision individuals “declining vaccination for any reason.”
To repeat: for any reason.
UW also told unsuccessful applicants that they could not “be accommodated without undue hardship” because it would “significantly compromise health and safety.”
The claim that accommodations would significantly compromise health and safety is false. At the same time UW was making that claim, its own published data showed that its “vaccination requirement” was associated with 1 fewer covid case on campus every 2 months. The requirement did not make campus any healthier or safer. UW knew this.
UW’s accommodation program was designed and administered in bad faith. Its purpose was to promote Goel’s objective of “maximum compliance,” which was very nearly achieved. This cynical and manipulative effort harmed many community members by compromising their individual health, safety and autonomy, with essentially no offsetting benefit.
There needs to be class action law suits.