Vaccine Mandates: What they Are, What They and Are Not, and Why Vaccines Should Not Be Mandated

The data is in: Vaccine mandates work, opines the New Jersey Star-Ledger Editorial Board (SLEB):

The numbers are in, and we hold this truth to be self-evident: COVID vaccine mandates work.

Or, if you prefer its prickly corollary: Where judgment and logic fail, employer mandates succeed, because the specter of job loss and financial hardship is apparently more persuasive than the threat of death.

This is the case in and around New Jersey, where data from health care and education sectors in our region is irrefutable: This tool works, and Gov. Murphy should use it to strengthen existing mandates and impose a passport system for public gatherings like the one used in New York City – because where persuasion fails, pressure works.

What “works” and what restrictions on our freedom are morally justified are two entirely different things. The statist stops at what works, measured by how many people comply. The statist isn’t concerned with the consequences to all other areas of citizens’ lives and rights. The Enlightened American starts with individual rights and considers all facts and weighs the long term consequences of diminished liberties the precedent sets before granting the state the power to mandate anything.

But next, we need to untangle the confusion about vaccine mandates embedded in this editorial. 

Mirriam-Webster defines mandate as an act “to officially require (something) : make (something) mandatory.” As Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine explains, there is a difference between a government order to get something and the “employer mandates” that the SLEB speaks of. An “employer mandate” is not a mandate at all. It’s a job requirement. As Mulshine points out, 

If the government ordered all citizens to get vaccinated, that would indeed be a mandate. That happened in 1905 when the city of Cambridge, Mass, ordered all residents to get vaccinated or face a $5 fine. A few went to court to block the law, but the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the city.

Whatever you think of that law, it clearly qualifies as a mandate.

It’s different with workers. If an airline tells its employees that they have to get vaccinated against COVID, as United Airlines recently did, that’s not a mandate. It’s just one of many job requirements.

 

And as Mulshine also points out, “if for some reason . . .  workers want to remain unvaccinated, that’s their right. But keeping their jobs isn’t.”

 

So, employers, whether private or government, have a valid right to require vaccines. But the Star-Ledger goes further. It urges the Governor to order all employers, public and private, to require vaccines via “a passport system” which would extend to all public gatherings. As SLEB editorial page editor Tom Moran reports elsewhere, the passport would apply to customers also and include all “restaurants and theaters and museums” regardless of the establishment's wishes. 

That would indeed be a mandate. (As of this writing, NJ Governor Phil Murphy is resisting the pressure to mandate vaccines, perhaps because of the pending gubernatorial election.)

Which leads us to the question of whether such a mandate justifies the freedom restrictions that results from such a violation of individual rights. 

My belief is no, it does not.

A vaccine protects the individual from contracting the disease, or if a breakthrough occurs, from a serious case of the illness. If the vaccinated is protected from the illness, he is by definition protected from the unvaccinated. So why mandate the vaccine? The unvaccinated are willingly taking the risk, but are not an inordinate threat to the vaccinated. 

The SLEB is wrong in its terminology. It is correct to support employers’ right to voluntarily require vaccines as a condition of employment. It is wrong to call on the state to force such a requirement on unwilling employers. That is an unjustified restriction of our liberty, and liberty considerations -- the protection of individual rights -- comes first in any country that considers itself a free society.

Related Reading:

COVID vaccinations: They’re not a mandate; they’re a choice by Paul Mulshine

NJ’s School/Vaccine Battle Need Not Pit Public Health Against Individual Rights

Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith

On Mandatory Vaccinations, Protect Everyone’s Right to Object, Not Just Religionists’ Rights

Vaccine Exemption Bill Violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments, Fairness

Related Viewing:

Vaccine False Alternatives: Bribes vs. Mandates, by Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate, New Ideal Live

As an FYI, here is the text of Ayn Rand's statement about mandatory vaccination and quarantines:

"Now, requiring inoculation against disease: should this be a job for the government? Most definitely not and there is a very simple answer for it. If it is medically proved that a certain inoculation is in fact practical and desirable, those who want it will take that inoculation. Now if some people do not see it that way—do not agree or don’t want to take it, only they will be in danger since all the other people will be inoculated. Those who do not go along, if they are wrong in this case, will merely catch the disease. They will not be a danger to anyone else and nobody has the right to force them to do anything for their own good against their own judgement. They will merely be ill then, but they could not infect others.

“The next question in regard to quarantine is somewhat different, because in the state of, sense of a quarantine, if someone has a contagious disease, against which there is no inoculation, then the government will have the right to require quarantine. What is the principle here? It’s to protect those people who are not ill, to protect the people who, to prevent the people who are ill from passing on their illness to others. Here you are dealing with a demonstrable physical damage. Remember that in all issues of protecting someone from physical damage, before a government can properly act, there has to be a scientific, objective demonstration of an actual physical danger. If it is demonstrated, then the government can act to protect those who are not yet ill from contacting the disease, in other words to quarantine the people who are ill is not an interference with their rights, it is merely preventing them from doing physical damage to others.”

This is from a Q&A session during her lecture “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” in 1963. (An edited transcript of this is found on pp. 12-13 of Ayn Rand Answers, edited by Robert Mayhew.)