On Tuesday, June 15, 2021, the State of New York lifted the vast majority of COVID-19 restrictions after reaching a statewide vaccination rate of 70 percent. These changes follow updated U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, which state that colleges and universities at which all students, faculty, and staff are fully vaccinated prior to the start of the semester can return to full capacity in-person learning, without requiring or recommending masking or physical distancing for people who are fully vaccinated.

Given these changes, Fordham is modifying its policies in the following ways:

Vaccination Status and Campus Policy:

All employees teaching and working in-person are required to be fully vaccinated by August 1, 2021, in anticipation of permanent U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of one or more of the currently available vaccines. Employees may request exemptions on medical and religious grounds here. (Students are already required to be fully vaccinated by August 1.)

All faculty, students, and staff are expected to be registered with VitalCheck, a HIPAA-compliant service that is linked to your Fordham ID card for ease of entry to campus. Faculty and staff can register with VitalCheck at: [email protected]. Students attending in-person classes in the fall are automatically registered with VitalCheck and will begin to receive the daily notifications closer to the start of classes, provided they have uploaded their vaccination records.

Unvaccinated students and employees with a Fordham-approved vaccine exemption must continue to wear masks indoors and maintain social distancing, if possible, consistent with their activities.

Fully vaccinated students and employees are not required to wear masks in any location on campus, indoors or out, including residence and dining halls, athletics facilities, classrooms, offices, conference rooms, hallways, elevators, and other spaces. On-campus personnel may continue to wear masks if they prefer to do so.

COVID-19 vaccinations are available on or near campus through August. Please click here for times and locations.

Neither quarantine nor isolation are required for asymptomatic, fully vaccinated individuals. Employees who experience COVID-19 symptoms should contact their primary care physicians or schedule a virtual consultation through the VitalCheck; students who experience COVID-19 symptoms should contact University Health Services.

COVID 19 Testing:

Asymptomatic, fully vaccinated students and employees will not be required to be tested for COVID-19. Prior to August 1, testing is required every week for unvaccinated employees and students. After August 1, testing will be required every week (on the 7th day) for students and employees with a Fordham-approved vaccine exemption. The University will replace routine PCR tests with rapid antigen tests (backed by PCR tests, if necessary).

Campus Access:

All employees entering campus will be required to be on VitalCheck no later than July 15, and must send their proof of vaccination to VitalCheck at [email protected] and [email protected]. VitalCheck will display proof of vaccination on your smartphone and serve as the campus access card. Validity of vaccination documents is confirmed via the New York state Department of Health database.

Campuses will remain closed to non-Fordham individuals for the fall with the exception of Fordham-sponsored events, individuals attending Mass at the Bronx campus, student and family tours, approved contractors and vendors, and students and staff of Fordham Prep.

Contractors and vendors approved by the University can access campus and be unmasked if they show proof of vaccination. Alternatively, they can provide a negative PCR COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours prior to their arrival, and wear a mask while inside campus buildings.

Temperature screenings will end at all security posts.

Campus Facilities and Public Spaces

All interior spaces will return to pre-COVID seat spacing and occupation capacity, including elevators, stairwells, hallways, and all other spaces. Signs limiting capacity will be covered over but not removed for the time being.

Central building ventilation systems will continue to operate in accordance with American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers and CDC guidelines, and buildings will continue to use windows and outside air settings for window AC units for ventilation.

Custodial Services will revert to pre-COVID cleaning routines; private offices will continue to be cleaned on request by placing the “please clean” door tag on the outside doorknob.

The University will remove all plexiglass barriers except those installed at security stations.

Events/Meetings/Conferences/Athletics

Fordham conferences/meetings with outside speakers or guests are permitted as long as they are part of a Fordham education program that are intended for an audience of Fordham faculty, students, or staff. Events held solely or primarily by external groups on campus will not be allowed this fall. All guests must provide proof of completed COVID-19 vaccination series either prior to arrival or upon arrival at campus security posts. Since all attendees will be vaccinated, masks and social distancing are not required. Capacity is limited only by the space size or Public Assembly permit for larger spaces.

Fordham-sponsored events held outside of the University will follow the venue’s COVID-19 policies.

Travel

University-sponsored travel has been restored. See the policy on University sponsored travel here.

Asymptomatic travelers entering New York from another country, U.S. state, or territory are no longer required to test or quarantine according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and New York state Department of Health. Students living overseas who are not vaccinated before they arrive in the U.S. will be required to notify Fordham in advance so they can be vaccinated upon arrival. Those students will be required to test weekly until they are 2 weeks past their final vaccine dose. Students living overseas can find more detailed information online.

Fordham will resume full occupancy of Ram Vans in the fall: only students, faculty, and staff will be eligible to use the Ram Van service during the Fall semester.

Fordham will continue to follow the evolving CDC and New York state public health guidelines. The University will also continue to bar external groups from meeting or renting space on campus, indoor or out, through the fall semester. This prohibition includes filming and photography by outside groups. Fordham-hosted events and meetings will be permitted, with appropriate protocols for screening non-University guests and speakers, as outlined above.

Finally, I want to thank you all for your cooperation with the University’s COVID-19 protocols and policies over the past 15 months: you have helped keep the campus community safe and healthy, and set the stage for a return to normal campus life in the fall.

Sincerely,

Marco A. Valera, Vice President for Administration
& COVID-19 Coordinator

This communication takes the place of the regularly scheduled Five Things email. Five Things will resume next week.

The fellowship was created to help train future leaders in public service. Fellows spend nine months focusing on civic engagement within various organizations, and develop a final independent project in cooperation with an agency of their choice.

Patterson, who majored in women, gender, and sexuality studies and took both pre-med and pre-law classes at Fordham, said she plans to use the fellowship to learn cross-sector approaches to eradicating health disparities in New York City.

Growing up as a Jamaican immigrant in Mount Vernon, New York, Patterson saw many of these injustices firsthand. At Fordham, she dedicated much of her time outside the classroom to fighting or bringing awareness to these inequities. As a senior she was president of ASILI—Fordham’s black student alliance—and she participated in several Global Outreach projects. She credits her Fordham Fund Scholarship with allowing her to immerse herself in the full Fordham experience.

Patterson became especially passionate about issues of racial injustice through her work with Urban Plunge, an optional pre-orientation program run by Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Over a three-day period at the beginning of her first year at Fordham, Patterson participated in one of several community-enriching programs offered throughout the Bronx and Manhattan. She loved the program so much that she became an Urban Plunge assistant for the next three years.

“It was a transformative experience that I think … planted the seeds in my mind for all of this,” she said. “It allowed me to become more social justice oriented as I was looking into a career in the health profession. I started to understand the racial inequality and health disparities within our current system.”

Patterson wrote her thesis on the relationship between African American women and the American health care system. “My Fordham education has helped guide my decision-making,” she said. “Fordham allowed me to follow my passions and has challenged me to become my best self.”

Now through the Coro Fellowship, Patterson is working with the executive vice president for strategy and innovation at the New York City Housing Authority, more commonly known by its acronym, NYCHA.

“Coro is providing me with inquiry tools, leadership training, and exposure through hands-on learning that I don’t think I would have gained elsewhere,” Patterson said. Next, she plans to apply to law school or pursue a master’s in public health.

“With this fellowship, I do feel like I am closer to achieving my goal,” she said.

“That was a failure of the policies, but in the end, we won. Consumption of sugary drinks during that time period has fallen dramatically in New York City,” he said at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Sept. 29.

Farley, the New York City Health Commissioner from 2009 to 2014, noted that annual surveys have found that the amount of sugary drinks that people say they drink daily has dropped by a third. The nation of Mexico and the city of Berkeley, California, have also instituted soda taxes similar to the one that was defeated in New York in 2012.

Farley’s appearance, with moderator William Baker, PhD, journalist-in-residence and Claudio Acquaviva Chair at the Graduate School of Education, marked the third in a series of Fordham’s Oral Archive on Governance in New York City: The Bloomberg Years.

In a lengthy Q&A with Baker and audience members, Farley lamented that too much attention is lavished on ways we can protect ourselves individually, even though we benefit more from group efforts.

“I saw a headline the other day, ‘What you can do to protect yourself from getting an antibiotic-resistant infection.’ And the answer is really, nothing. There’s almost nothing you can do individually,” he said.

“But there’s a lot we can do as a society to prevent that.”

Reminiscing about his time in office, Farley praised the former mayor for making decisions based on data and not asking him what the political ramifications might be. That isn’t to say that Bloomberg gave the thumbs up to every idea Farley and his team proposed: Farley said he shot down an idea to ban the sale of cigarettes at pharmacies—which he noted have a “halo of health” around them that conflicts with cigarettes—and to ban their sale within a certain distance of schools.

“He listened and gave it a fair hearing, but at the end he said no. Because while he’s a public health guy, he’s also a businessman who kind of chastens at the idea of government interfering with business,” he said.

Farley said he was most proud to have put the issue of sugary drinks on the map, and to have extended the smoking ban to parks and beaches. He said his only regret was not paying closer attention to politics to get a better idea of what opponents were doing.

He detailed many of the stories of New Yorkers whose lives were saved in his book, Saving Gotham: A Billionaire Mayor, Activist Doctors, and the Fight for Eight Million Lives (W. W. Norton & Co., 2015)

Ultimately, public health should go beyond fighting pandemics, inspecting restaurants, and controlling pests, he said. It should tackle bigger problems like obesity, smoking, or designer drugs, which he said are the real challenges of the future.

“Public health needs to be in the service of dealing with modern-day stress. To do that, it needs to reinvent itself, and it needs an entirely different set of skills: communication skills, people skills, politics skills, things that are more relevant,” he said.

In a sample of nearly 6 million children born in California between 1997 and 2007, Christine Fountain, PhD and researchers from Columbia University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the incidence of autism was twice as high for ART births compared to non-ART births.

Their findings, which were published in the American Journal of Public Health in March, are part of the largest and most diverse study to date exploring the relationship between ART and autism.

“We were interested generally in the social factors behind the increase in autism diagnoses seen over the last decade,” said Fountain, an assistant professor of sociology. “One of the broad factors we looked at was parental age. That is where ART seemed to play a role, because ART allows women to push the upper age limits for childbearing.”

Autism spectrum disorder refers to a serious development disability marked by deficits in communication and social interaction. Currently, about 1 in 68 U.S. children have been diagnosed with a form of autism—a statistic that has increased rapidly over the last decade.

The precise causes and mechanisms of autism remain unclear, but scientists have identified several risk factors, including preterm birth, low birth weight, gestational diabetes, and other complications during pregnancy. The disorder has also been linked to certain parental characteristics, such as older parental age, higher socioeconomic status and education, and white race—characteristics that are also shared by many who use ART to conceive.

The researchers also found that the incidence of autism was much higher in ART children who were part of multiple births—twins, triplets, etc.—as opposed to singleton children. A significant number of ART conceptions result in multiple births because multiple embryos are transferred during the procedure to increase the chances of a successful pregnancy.

“In general, multiple births [whether conceived by ART or not]bring greater risks of complications during pregnancy, such as gestational diabetes, preterm birth, and low birth weight, which are also risks associated with autism,” Fountain said.

Fortunately, the team’s findings suggest a potential point of intervention to help reduce the risk of autism for families who use ART.

“When appropriate, transferring one embryo rather than multiples could be a way to reduce autism risk among ART-conceived children,” Fountain said. “However, we need more research in terms of understanding the actual mechanisms by which ART and autism are linked.”

Fountain’s next research study will be an analysis of ART-born children who have naturally conceived siblings. This, Fountain hopes, could help to isolate the biological factors from social and familial factors.

“Because many ART children come from families that are relatively well-off, it’s not surprising that there would be a higher rate of diagnosis than other children,” she said. “I’m hoping to untangle some of those social factors with this new study.”