Mandating COVID-19 Vaccines for PALTC Staff: The Ethical Argument

Vaccine mandates have been a prickly issue in this country since the smallpox vaccine initiatives in the early 20th century. That’s not surprising, of course. America, a country that generally holds individual freedoms to be mainly inviolable, has a hard time constraining those freedoms in the interest of the common good. Despite this, public health mandates such as childhood vaccines, masking, and travel restrictions have been considered ethical as long as they satisfy three criteria: the risk of allowing unfettered individual choice must represent a significant danger to society, the benefit of the mandate must be high, and, finally, the risk to the individual in complying with the mandate must be low.