"Although her university had a vaccine mandate, she had a long-documented autoimmune condition for which she received a medical exemption. However, she was still subject to condescending lectures from biology professors regarding how she was being unscientific in her refusal to receive her shot.
One particular professor even denied her access to equipment she needed to use in his lab, claiming his lab had a vaccine mandate that didn’t allow for exemptions. Her peers provided little reprieve. Vaccinated graduate students who would disregard social distancing and masking policies when interacting with one another, would strictly enforce them when interacting with her.
Countless people from all walks of life have found themselves lost in a shared Kafkaesque dream since the dawn of the Pandemic Era nearly three years ago, yet, what makes accounts such as those contained here particularly jarring is that these students were not simply contending with a class of administrative automotons, as many have, but with well-trained, well-educated biologists – the kind of people one might have initially expected to put up the greatest resistance to illogical and scientifically unsound Covid policies.
Instead though, the group that should have been among those to put up the greatest resistance to Covid policy were among those most willing to embrace it. They casually dismissed and sometimes actively exacerbated the harms such policies wrought. And perhaps most disturbingly, they not only damaged the careers of aspiring young biologists, but worked to assure biology becomes a field characterized by those willing to acquiesce to orthodoxy."
