The case for vaccine mandates | Daily News

The case for vaccine mandates

COVID-19 booster dose rollout for over 60s. Pictures by Sulochana Gamage
COVID-19 booster dose rollout for over 60s. Pictures by Sulochana Gamage

Most Americans have gotten vaccinated because they simply want protection from COVID-19. Some small number of citizens has gotten jabbed in order to go to restaurants, attend sporting events, or qualify for lottery prizes.

You’d think that would be enough. Effective vaccine against a life-threatening disease, opportunity to regain some semblance of normalcy, a coupon for 10 percent off your next purchase at the store where you got your shot: truly a no-brainer.

And yet, there has been resistance.

Imagine an alternative ending to the film I Am Legend in which the two immune humans transport the anti-zombie vaccine to a compound of survivors only to be met with questions like, “How long did it take to develop this vaccine? Does it contain a microchip? Are you a shill for Big Pharma?” This is the same vaccine that Will Smith blew himself up to safeguard? For some people, every gift horse is a Trojan horse.

It would be one thing if the anti-vaxxers were a tiny minority living like hermits in the wilderness. Alas, they are very much among us, offering up their bodies on a daily basis to keep COVID-19 alive and circulating. Who’d have expected that a deadly virus would acquire such a rabid fan base?

Since carrots have gone only so far in breaking down the resistance of the hesitant, governments are now deploying sticks. In one country after another, states are using various forms of economic coercion to break down resistance. These “mandates” require workers by sector, or in some cases all sectors, to comply or risk losing their jobs.

As a result, all that anti-lockdown and anti-masking fervor is now getting funneled into opposing these government efforts to boost vaccination rates and prevent the next wave of infection from overwhelming hospitals and funeral homes.

Several hundred protesters with signs like “Mandate equals Communism” recently massed on the Golden Gate Bridge to protest the California measures. In Melbourne, anti-mandate protesters are comparing the Australian government to the Nazis. In Italy, the far-right Forza Nuova was behind a violent street demonstration against the government’s vaccine mandate. This is all very troubling. What used to be common sense—let’s eradicate polio, let’s stamp out smallpox—has become a debatable proposition.

I’m worried about how the world will react to the inevitable Green mandates that governments will impose in the near future. After all, voluntary commitments to cut carbon emissions are just not doing the trick. The recent climate confab in Glasgow may well prove to be the high-water mark in this doomed laissez-faire approach.

Understanding Pushback

In Italy, the “green pass” was initially required only to eat at restaurants, go to museums, and work out in gyms. Then you had to show proof of vaccination to travel by planes, trains, and ferries.

Last month, the government required all public and private workers to show their green pass to go to work. And that’s when the protests really got heated. Dockworkers went on strike in Genoa and Trieste. A rally of 10,000 in Rome on the eve of the new regulation going into effect turned violent. It’s not as if Italy is a vaccine-resistant country. Around three out of four Italians have been fully vaccinated. That’s not as good as Portugal (86 percent fully vaccinated), but it is way better than the United States (which remains below 60 percent).

However, really noisy people can capture headlines regardless of how representative they might be. Consider the United States where protesters have argued that mandates for hospital workers, police, and airline personnel will lead to mass resignations.

These mandates, by the way, can be remarkably effective. In San Francisco, for instance, the vaccination rate among city workers rose from 55 percent in June to a post-mandate 94 percent in October.

The success of mandates and the relative impotence of the protests notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to dismiss anti-vaccine sentiment. First of all, the stubbornly unvaccinated will continue to determine the future course of the pandemic. Second, the reluctantly vaccinated will still cling to their views, which will inevitably be expressed at later occasions.

Let’s not get distracted by the bizarre and the simply misinformed. What lies beneath is a basic mistrust of authorities, whether scientific, political, or broadly civic. The predominant sentiment among anti-vaxxers is that these authorities shouldn’t be allowed to tell them what to do with their own bodies.

In some ways, the rhetoric is reminiscent of the mantra of the pro-choice movement: “keep your laws off my body.” But it’s a misleading resemblance. Anti-vaxxers do have a choice and it’s not comparable to a back-alley abortion. They can quit their jobs. In some cases, as in Italy, they can even keep their jobs if they submit to regular testing. And such testing has the added benefit of enabling the country to better track any potential outbreaks.

And let’s remember: Mandates are necessary to safeguard public health. The same applies to vaccines for children in public school. In New York, health care workers must get vaccinated against measles and rubella while child-care workers in Rhode Island are required to get an annual flu shot.

Sure, I have a healthy skepticism of authority, but it doesn’t trump my commitment to the public good. To be blunt, anti-vaxxers just don’t care about the health of the community. That sentiment, which is also shared by plenty of people who get vaccinated for purely selfish reasons, does not bode well for efforts to address the climate crisis.

Future Green Mandates

The commitments that nations made in Paris five years ago to shrink their carbon footprints: voluntary. The promises made in Glasgow this month: voluntary. The choices that you will make this year about buying a car, heating your house, feeding your family: all voluntary.

In a perfect world, everyone cooperates voluntarily to preserve the planet. In reality, some people do so, others promise to do so and don’t, and the rest have all along been looking out for number one. This mix of responses to a public policy challenge falls into the category of a “collective action problem.”

Usually at some point in a collective action problem, some authority has to intervene to establish rules of the road to protect the common good. So far, the interventions to reduce carbon emissions have been largely non-coercive, except perhaps for workers in a handful of countries who have lost their jobs in fossil fuel industries.

Perhaps governments will continue to use markets to constrain individual choices. Everyone will have to buy electric cars because the old-fashioned combustion kind simply won’t be available. Air travel will become prohibitively expensive except for the elite. Locally grown tomatoes will crowd out ones shipped in from other parts of the world.

But “free” markets—and both corporate actors and individual consumers—are slow to respond to existential crises, are resistant to government interventions, and prioritize prices above all else. Markets by themselves will not shift resources quickly enough from the still-profitable-but- highly-pollutant sectors to the less-profitable-except-in-the-long-term Green sectors.

So, let’s imagine a future government mandate that all businesses with more than 100 employees have one year to become carbon-neutral. Or that all citizens are capped at a certain number of kilowatt hours per month in their household. Or everyone has a certain travel allowance measured in carbon emissions that covers their commute, their work trips, and their vacations.

As with the vaccination mandate, the rationale will be that individuals have to change their behaviour for the good of the whole. The green mandates will encounter similar resistance. Some people will continue to insist that Climate Change doesn’t exist, that the government is over-reacting or overreaching, that liberty consists of the right to own an SUV and drive it anywhere one likes.

With Climate Change, however, the threats are not quite so immediate or palpable. People are dying from rising waters. The casualties will mount up not next week but in 20 years. And what of the use of taxpayer dollars to fund a Green transition in the Global South? It’s one thing to ask people to get vaccinated to save lives in their immediate community. Will people submit to mandates to save lives in the Maldives?

Much will depend on the level of trust citizens have in their governments. The skepticism that is concentrated among anti-vaxxers is, unfortunately, more widely shared. According to Pew, only 24 percent of Americans believe that government can be trusted to do what’s right. The average among all economically advanced countries is higher—45 percent trust their national governments—but still not encouraging.

And that trust will also depend on the nature of the governments themselves. Where the far right is in charge, all bets are off. The same applies to the corrupt, the authoritarian, and the simply incompetent.

All of which is to say: governments have to prove that these vaccine mandates work in controlling the pandemic. They have to ensure that these infrastructure and pandemic recovery funds make a concrete and sustainable difference in people’s lives. They have to demonstrate that government is committed to that old-fashioned principle of improving the public good.

If governments fail this test, here and now, then forget about meeting the challenge of Climate Change. Without effective government measures and sufficient public support for future Green mandates, we might as well be living in houses of straw and sticks.

(John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article was published. His latest book is Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response)

- Eurasia Review


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