Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Is a Big Mistake
Sept. 10, 2021
By Robby Soave
There’s one person that President Biden desperately needs to consult about his new federal vaccine mandate: President-
elect Biden.
In December 2020, as the prospect of imminent mass vaccination against Covid-19 was finally becoming a reality, Mr. Biden leveled with the American people: He said he would not force anyone to get the jab. “No, I don’t think it should be mandatory,”
he told reporters. “I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory.”
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, recently reiterated Mr. Biden’s position. “That’s not the role of the federal government,” she
declared on July 23, referring to the idea of a government mandate. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
said the same thing a week later: “There will be no nationwide mandate.”
So much for that. On Thursday, Mr. Biden announced a far-reaching vaccine mandate that applies to most federal workers, hospitals, public schools and 80 million employees of private companies. Under the White House’s
presumptuous plan, workplaces that employ more than 100 people must require their employees to either get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing — a burden so onerous that for many businesses, it will not be a choice at all.
The president’s plan is certainly well intentioned. The vaccines are the only tried-and-true strategy for defeating Covid; government officials should both encourage vaccination and make it easier to get vaccinated. Health officials must continue selling people on the vaccines by emphasizing the considerable upside: Vaccination decreases transmission of the virus and turns hospitalization and death into very unlikely outcomes. It provides such robust protection that 99 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the United States now occur in the
unvaccinated population. Vaccination works, and it’s the right option for a vast majority of Americans.
But forcing vaccines on a minority contingent of unwilling people is a huge error that risks shredding the social fabric of a country already being pulled apart by political tribalism.
The president should not — and most likely does not — have the power to unilaterally compel millions of private-sector workers to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs: Mr. Biden is presiding over a vast expansion of federal authority, one that Democrats will certainly come to regret the next time a Republican takes power. Moreover, the mechanism of enforcement — a presidential decree smuggled into law by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration — is fundamentally undemocratic. Congress is supposed to make new laws, not an unaccountable bureaucratic agency.
While more than 70 percent of American adults have received a shot, a smaller but sizable group of people, for various reasons, are unvaccinated. Some members of this group have antibodies from a previous Covid case and are reasonably protected from future illness,
according to recent data. There is little benefit to forcing vaccination on such people, and Mr. Biden’s decision to not exempt them is a significant misstep.
Unvaccinated individuals who were never infected by Covid would certainly benefit from vaccination. But the coercive approach has major downsides. The most anti-vaccine Americans — those who are adamantly refusing the jab because of a misguided belief that it’s dangerous — will probably not change their minds because the government is strong-arming employers. On the contrary, the federal mandate might actually be taken as confirmation of their paranoid suspicions that the vaccines have less to do with their health and more to do with social control.
As a practical matter, it’s undeniable that the federal mandate will engender a titanic backlash and create a spate of lawsuits. Vaccine holdouts have already taken legal action against employers requiring vaccination:
Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia who had recovered from Covid and has antibodies, recently fought his institution’s mandate and prevailed. And Republican governors are certain to battle Mr. Biden over this policy. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a Republican,
tweeted at the president, “See you in court.”
It’s true that courts have upheld vaccine mandates in certain circumstances: In a 1922
case, the Supreme Court famously ruled that a city ordinance could deny admission to students who failed to get the smallpox vaccine. But the assertion that a public official can completely sidestep the legislative process and enact a much farther-reaching vaccine mandate via administrative action should elicit skepticism from even those who vigorously support vaccination.
There are other ways to nudge the populace in the right direction. Rather than punishing the unvaccinated, the government could create an incentive for vaccination by lifting restrictions for the vaccinated. This was the approach initially taken by the C.D.C., which said this year that since the vaccinated were well protected, they could almost always safely discard their masks. Unfortunately, the more transmissible Delta variant spooked federal health officials, and the C.D.C. reversed course. Some municipalities, including Washington, then reimposed mask mandates, even though the science hasn’t actually changed: The vaccinated are still well protected from Covid.
Some people would probably voluntarily get the shot if they knew for certain that a vaccination card was a ticket to living a normal life once again. Regrettably, Mr. Biden’s mandate moves in the exact opposite direction, with the White House saying his plan will
ensure that “strong mask requirements remain in place.” If the government is concerned about vaccine hesitancy, it should trust the vaccines and drop other restrictions. People should know that
if they get vaccinated, they will be better off. Instead, the White House is sending the message that people
must get vaccinated but should hardly expect things to be different afterward.
It’s worth repeating that the federal vaccine mandate represents a broad expansion of the executive branch’s power. And Mr. Biden will not be the chief executive forever. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a plausible 2024 Republican presidential candidate, has used his current authority to prohibit private vaccine mandates in his state. Is this really the time to solidify the idea that the president is the ultimate authority on whether such things should be required or forbidden?
Of course, traveling for leisure fduring this pandemic is utter foolishness in the first place, but the U.S. is being obnoxious - more people tested positive on Thursday in Texas than have tested positive in Papua New Guinea during the entire pandemic. 
It’s like when the U.S. issues travel warnings due to violence in other countries… uh, which country has a mass shooting on a daily basis again?
Apparently his kidneys are failing now.
