I Used To Think School Vaccine Mandates Made Sense, But The Covid Jab Changed Everything

As Democrat-run state legislatures consider requiring Covid shots for children to attend school, many parents like me are looking back at how their perspective on vaccine mandates has changed over the past two years.

If you had asked me three years ago why the government should mandate vaccinations like the chickenpox and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines in order to attend school, I would have argued that vaccine mandates are a valid exercise of government authority to protect the “public health,” since unvaccinated people can spread the disease to others, particularly those too medically fragile to receive vaccinations. I would have appealed to “herd immunity” and called most anti-vaxxers “irresponsible” or “selfish.”

I now believe vaccine uptake should rise and fall based on the merits of the shots, not government pressure or mandates, for two reasons. First, it is wrong to coerce people to inject themselves or their children with a product they do not believe benefits them. To violate someone’s bodily autonomy so they can enjoy the same rights, liberties, and entitlements as others, such as air travel or public education, is in itself a harm. It is tyrannical.

Second, mandates are an attempt to ensure high vaccine uptake, but government coercion feeds into a warped regulatory system that may lead to unsafe or ineffective shots being left on the market while weakening trust in vaccines generally.

The first objection to eliminating mandates is that it will likely lead to outbreaks of previously rare diseases with low vaccination rates. If you don’t vaccinate your child, your child may be vulnerable to diseases such as measles or chickenpox. This could cause children a great deal of suffering, especially in the former case.

Even if your child is vaccinated, however, there’s very small chance he gets infected in an outbreak. We haven’t had a polio outbreak in this country for many decades, which would lead to permanent injury or death in a small subset of victims. Nobody wants an outbreak of a terrible disease like this, and helping neighbors avoid outbreaks is a healthy secondary motivation to maintaining your own child’s health.

But the desire for herd immunity or full eradication of a disease should not override individuals’ right to make serious choices about their own bodies, which some call bodily autonomy. The potential for dangerous outbreaks is an argument for extremely safe and effective vaccines and trustworthy information campaigns, for informative and empathetic discussions between patients and doctors, not top-down mandates.

It’s not at all clear that mandates truly support high vaccine uptake, anyway. A 2017 analysis done by the European Union-funded ASSET Project comparing vaccine recommendations to mandates across European countries didn’t point to “any evident relationship between vaccination coverage and national policies on compulsory vaccinations.” As Gary Finnegan wrote for Vaccines Today, “ASSET experts have also argued that while mandatory vaccination might fix a short-term problem, it is not a long-term solution. Better organisation of health systems and strong communication strategies may prove