Mandatory Vaccination against the Covid-19 virus is framed as a moral issue by the prestige media. Public health experts are propagating the narrative that failure to become vaccinated is endangering the lives of others. Writing in the New York Times, Ezekiel J Emanuel, Aaron Glickman, and Amaya Diana contend that vaccination is a moral imperative: “None of us likes being told what to do. But getting vaccinated is not just about our personal health, but the health of our communities and country.”
The moralistic language of vaccine advocacy is manipulating citizens to think that refusing vaccination makes them responsible for the spread of Covid-19. Yet, vaccinated people are still able to contract and transmit the virus.
Mandating vaccination based on considerations of public health is questionable, since vaccines are no sure thing when it comes to preventing transmissions. The benefits of vaccination do not include the prevention of transmission, so despite the message of mandatory vaccination campaigns, advocates’ case is weak. But even though their claim is uninspiring, advocates in favor of vaccine mandates will adjust the goal post to argue that by cutting the viral load vaccines will lessen the strain on the public health system.
Again, this is another mistaken assumption, because as Ryan McMaken points out the hospitals were never overwhelmed: “Memphis’s overflow hospital was closed down after an entire year of never housing a single patient. In late 2020, after months of media reports that New York hospitals were utterly overwhelmed, Andrew Cuomo announced New York hospitals “were never overwhelmed.” Colorado built a twenty-two hundred–patient overflow hospital. It was never used. Last spring, a $17 million overflow facility in Houston was dismantled without ever being used.”
Similarly, a study published in the European Journal of Epidemiology weeks ago punctures the belief that higher vaccination rates are linked to fewer Covid cases. After examining 68 countries and 2947 counties in the US, the authors submitted the reverse to be true: “The trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days.”
Meanwhile, when countries with lower rates of vaccination are compared to their peers with higher rates of vaccination, the results appear quite shocking: “ The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.”
Likewise, in the article “The Impact of Covid Vaccination on COVID Death Rates: Empirical Evidence from California and Illinois,” the authors Germinal Van and Emilio Barbosa Valdiosera conclude that ‘COVID vaccines were not effective enough to unilaterally prevent COVID deaths from occurring despite high rates of efficacy.” In fact, research suggests that mandatory vaccination could limit the demand for vaccines. Katrin Schmelz and Samuel Bowles in a new paper posit that people learn by conforming to social trends, hence mandatory vaccination can negate the beneficial effects of conformism derived from voluntary vaccination.
Essentially, the desire to comply with social trends will eventually motivate people to get vaccinated without government mandates, thereby making it easier to achieve herd immunity. Arguments for vaccine mandates have cannibalized mainstream outlets, though the problem is that such assumptions are unsupported by evidence. Pundits can continue to shame people into embracing vaccine mandates; however, their arguments will always be fake news.
