The Science of the COVID-19 Pandemic - Is it Medical Science or Political Science?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, governments, businesses and universities have regularly proclaimed that their response to COVID-19 is just "following the science".  This has led to near universal mandates requiring that citizens, employees and students be vaccinated whether they believe that it is in their best interest or not.  The penalty for disobedience has been the loss of rights, the loss of jobs and, in the case of university students, the loss of their ability to attend these bastions of higher learning.  In the case of university students, this is particularly unreasonable given that the likelihood that they will die from or suffer severe health issues from a COVID-19 infection is very low.  That said, this has not stopped the leadership at Canada's tenth largest university from imposing its will on students as shown in this posting.

 

Here is what the University of Western Ontario's vaccine mandate for students looked like on August 22, 2022:

 

Note that Western's bureaucracy had made the decision that all students, staff and faculty must have received one booster after considering "input from their experts and own community".

  

Now, let's look at how Western's COVID-19 vaccine mandate has morphed:

 

 

Three months later and Western's "medical experts" and local public health officials have declared that the policy regarding mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for everyone on campus has been "revoked" because the "science" must have changed over the three month period.

 

What changed?  Was it this:

 

 

...or this: 

 

Or was it the fact that it is well known that the vaccines do not prevent transmission and were never designed to do so?  Wasn't that clear during the Omicron era in early to mid-2022 where vaccinated individuals were just as likely to become infected as those who were not vaccinated, well prior to Western's decision to mandate vaccinations for all students, faculty and staff?  Or, rather than actually using "science", has Western's bureaucracy fallen into a "political science" trap of its own making?  It is highly unlikely that medical science has changed that much in three short months but then again, we live in unprecedented times.

But, you will notice that, according to the decision makers at Western, the science on masking remains intact.  Bravo to those virtue signalling face rags!