Full FDA approval was announced Monday for Pfizer’s BioNTech COVID-19 vaccination. An announcement for the Moderna vaccine likely will follow.
With delta variant cases and hospitalizations increasing, particularly among the unvaccinated, it’s time for employers and schools to mandate the jab for their workers.
Only with a widespread, employer-based mandate will America turn this year-and-a-half pandemic into a virus that the nation can live with, much like Americans live with the flu.
It has been 530 days since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Nine months after that, the Food and Drug Administration gave Pfizer’s vaccine emergency approval for persons 16 and older. In May, the FDA included kids 12 and older in the emergency use authorization.
Now, with more than 1.2 billion doses shipped worldwide, a high-level representative of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that about 11.1 in a million people report having an anaphylactic reaction to the Pfizer vaccine. Those numbers mean the benefit of getting the vaccine significantly outweighs the risk of not getting it.
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Vaccine mandates are not new. Parents have long been required to submit vaccine records for their children when enrolling them in school. Last month, President Joe Biden required federal employees to get a COVID-19 vaccination. And many universities have required students living on campus – and in some cases, faculty – to get vaccinated.
As far back as 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state smallpox vaccine requirement in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, stating that “the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. … Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”
Not only is there compelling scientific, historical and legal precedent to support compulsory vaccination, most Americans are in favor of it, too. In a USA TODAY/Ipsos poll, 61% of people surveyed said they would support a vaccine requirement for the common good.
But with only 51.5% of the population fully vaccinated, kids going back to school and cases increasing, America can’t wait for people to make up their minds any longer. After months of proving to Americans that the vaccine is safe, it’s clear that employer-based mandates are the only way to get some people to act – for their own sake and for the safety of everyone around them.
No less than the health of your loved ones hangs in the balance.
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