Are Vaccine Mandates Justifiable?

Some call them reasonable public health measures, while others say they are an un-American invasion of privacy

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MANDATES CAN MAKE SENSE

by Benjamin Wittes

I WILL NOT KNOWINGLY ENGAGE with unvaccinated people in person. I’m happy to do it remotely. I’m not interested in being punitive or stigmatizing, but I’m also not interested in becoming a vector for transmission. And so if somebody tells me that they are not vaccinated, I’m really not interested in being in their presence. I will, of course, make exceptions to that for people who have legitimate medical reasons to not be vaccinated, or for children for whom the vaccine is not approved on an emergency basis. My own personal vaccine mandate is that I don’t choose to socialize in person with people who are themselves choosing to be vectors for the virus’ transmission.

I think that there may be good prudential reasons to avoid formal vaccine mandates. That is, you may risk radicalizing people further by doing it. So I’m not necessarily opposed to the strategy that the Biden administration has taken, which is to encourage employers and other entities that are not the government to have mandates but not to actually do it themselves.

That said, I certainly don’t oppose a national vaccine mandate. And to me, the question is purely an instrumental one, which is to say that it matters to me only what will get the most people vaccinated. And if a vaccine mandate were to do that, I have absolutely no problem with it.