UNC faculty are calling on campus leadership to require proof of vaccination from students and employees amid concerns of students falsely reporting their vaccination status.

While the UNC System is not requiring students to get the COVID-19 vaccine ahead of the fall semester, it is asking that students self-report whether they got their shots. Those who are unvaccinated, or choose not to self-report their vaccination status, will be required to undergo weekly COVID testing.

There are new concerns, however, that some students are paying money for fake vaccination cards to avoid that requirement.

When students self-report, or attest, their vaccination status through Connect Carolina, they have the option to verify their date of inoculation as well as the make of the vaccine in which they were administered. UNC Provost Bob Blouin said they can also voluntarily upload a picture of their vaccination card.

“Once that is uploaded, we can examine that and verify at least that it appears to be accurate,” Blouin said. “Then we can do an audit of that card against the state database and verify that. Obviously to do that level of verification is incredibly time-consuming and would be problematic.”

Buying fake vaccination cards and submitting them to the university is an honor code violation and may result in disciplinary action up to suspension from the university.

Amid concerns that students are falsely attesting their vaccination status, Blouin said the university has already done some early auditing and random sampling of vaccination cards.

“So far that has looked pretty good, but I would just be cautious in terms of interpreting that conclusion because we have more work to do there,” Blouin said.

At a specially called meeting on Wednesday, UNC’s Faculty Executive Committee met to discuss campus safety measures ahead of students’ return to the classroom in less than two weeks.

Faculty noted that, during the auditing process, there is a “gray area” when verifying the vaccination status of students who received their shots outside of North Carolina. Blouin agreed that accessing health databases both in and out-of-state is proving difficult.

“The databases don’t talk to one another and so we have limited access to the North Carolina database, but not to every state’s database as a university,” Blouin said.

The university reports that 25,000 students have already attested to their vaccination status. Of those students, 94 percent have indicated that they’ve received the vaccine with 60 percent having uploaded their vaccination card as proof.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Faculty Executive Committee member Joy Renner said requiring documentation of vaccination should be mandatory, not voluntary, for students and staff – especially amid a rise in community coronavirus cases.

“I think for students to have to upload some kind of documentation is stronger than just attesting that they’ve been vaccinated,” Renner said. “I think it takes them another step of stopping and thinking [that] they’re providing a document to the university and attesting it to be their document. I just think it raises that awareness to students a little bit [so] that we could get a little bit closer to what’s the true percentage of students vaccinated.”

In addition to students, 82 percent of faculty and 54 percent of staff said they have received their vaccines.

While mandating that the campus community provide proof of vaccination would require approval from the UNC System, the Faculty Executive Committee is pushing for that change.

The committee unanimously adopted a resolution Wednesday, asking the UNC System to give the chancellor and provost the authority to require proof from employees and students.

 

Lead photo via Brandon Bieltz/UNC-Chapel Hill.

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