Washington Discusses the Ethical and Practice Considerations of a COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate. (Photo Credit: thesuffolkjournal.com)
The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
President Biden has announced that the White House supports states making all adults eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations by May 1st. The serious contingent of the U.S. adult population that harbours serious reservations about the COVID-19 vaccine’s safety and efficacy has once again pushed the issue of mandatory vaccination to the forefront of the national conversation.
Thirty percent of Americans still say that they do not intend to get the COVID-19 vaccine despite experts estimating that it will take between 70% and 90% of the population being vaccinated to reach herd immunity. As it is unclear whether voluntary vaccination will be sufficient to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus, the potential for individual states to mandate vaccination has raised important questions about the tension between personal liberty and public health. While the Supreme Court has clearly decided that it is the prerogative of states to decide whether reasonable measures like compulsory vaccination are necessary to address public health issues, the question of when states should be exercising this power is very much undecided.
The legal status of compulsory vaccination in the United States has remained largely unambiguous for the last hundred years. In the 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts case, the Harlan Supreme Court ruled that the police powers of states allow them to “enact…compulsory vaccination law[s]” and that, in a wider sense, states may pass “health laws of every description” to “protect the public health and the public safety” of its citizenry. For health crises, states may prioritize the “welfare, comfort and safety of the many” over the individual liberty of citizens to decide whether a vaccine is in their own interest. The liberty of the individual is, at times, subject to the needs of the general population, especially when that population is facing “the pressure of great dangers” such as illnesses and pandemics.
The COVID-19 pandemic is quite clearly one of those “great dangers.” With estimated deaths above 530,000, COVID-19 has claimed more American lives than the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. It has had reverberating impacts on U.S. education, employment, and commerce. Students are falling behind due to the lack of in-person education, and record numbers of Americans have been laid off from work in the past year. The COVID-19 crisis has potentially been one of the most destructive events in recent American history, causing intense political division and economic downturn, to speak nothing of the tragedy inherent to the loss of life for so many of our friends, family, and neighbors. If any pandemics in U.S. history have potentially warranted a vaccination mandate, the COVID-19 crisis is one of them.
However, the need for such a mandate is contingent on how the spread of COVID-19 is affected by those who voluntarily opt to receive the vaccine. At the time of this writing, while only 10% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, COVID-19 deaths have dropped 55% from their peak 7-day average in January. The vaccine appears to be having an outsized effect on the transmission of COVID-19 despite its slow rollout, and that effect will only continue to increase as more adults are vaccinated. Despite this, many have been quick to jump to the need for compulsory vaccination laws without waiting for the necessary scientific data to come in.
COVID-19 has been a highly politicized public health issue, and the resulting division on the proper response to it has prevented an open and robust dialogue on what measures are necessary to defeat it. A significant proportion of the U.S. population believes that the COVID-19 crisis has been overblown in one way or another and that the current social distancing health measures are arbitrary and unnecessary. According to many of these individuals, rejecting even the most basic health measures is a valid expression of one’s civil liberties. However, while supporting civil liberty is a commendable cause, this refusal to obey the medical community’s basic health guidelines in the middle of a pandemic is frankly irresponsible. A mask mandate should not be a partisan issue. Instead, it should be based on a rational and scientific consideration of the virus’ progression. The fact that polarization has made the level-headed consideration of this crisis less possible and encouraged some to reject beneficial health measures is unfortunate and has likely led to additional American deaths.
Conversely, many Americans have gone to great lengths to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet many have not only taken personal precautions against infection but also judged and criticized others who don’t exercise equal effort. On our own Princeton campus, a tattling culture has emerged, where reporting every possible instance of social contact violation is seen as a virtuous act keeping the community safe. A recent post on an anonymous Princeton forum TigerConfessions put the threat quite succinctly: “I will…snitch on you if I see you acting up.” Such excessive action—similar to no protective action at all—is very detrimental to the wider community. Compelling others to engage in unnecessarily intrusive behaviors creates division and discord among people, potentially outweighing the good that would be created by those behaviors being forced upon them.
We would be best served by seeking to avoid this outcome with our vaccination efforts. If vaccines are made mandatory, strife among Americans will result. Some citizens will react negatively to what they feel is an attack on their personal liberty. With that in mind, we should work to ensure that the measures we take are necessary to the public welfare. Before mandating vaccines, we should wait to see the outcome of voluntary vaccine efforts. We should also educate the public on the safety and efficacy of the available vaccines. Given the number of individuals ready and willing to take the vaccine, states are still months away from potentially needing any mandatory vaccine measures. We should use that time to reduce the number of individuals skeptical of the vaccines to hopefully address this issue before it begins.
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