COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates
The Covid-19 vaccines were scientific triumphs that saved countless lives. By contrast, Covid-19 vaccination mandates were unconstitutional travesties that trampled individual rights. Imposed by the Biden administration, some state governments, and many public and private colleges, they represented an egregious overreach of administrative power and a blatant disregard of the rule of law. While courts eventually blocked or struck down many federal vaccine mandates as unlawful, millions of people received unwanted jabs in the interim.
President Biden initially assured Americans that there would be no federal vaccine mandates, stating in 2020 as President-elect that: “I wouldn’t demand it to be mandatory.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki reaffirmed in July 2021 that vaccine mandates were “not the role of the federal government.” Yet, in a stunning reversal, Biden imposed sweeping mandates just two months later, declaring that “our patience [with unvaccinated Americans] is wearing thin.” This statement and others suggested that unvaccinated people posed a threat to their fellow citizens, which was never true because the vaccines did not stop transmission of the virus to third parties—a fact which the government knew.
The most egregious abuse was the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) emergency standard requiring businesses with 100 or more employees to force their workers to get vaccinated or undergo testing weekly. Forcing this choice between workers’ “jobs and their jabs” far exceeded OSHA’s statutory authority. Congress created the agency to be a workplace safety watchdog that had no business intruding into the private medical decisions of millions of Americans. Fortunately, the Supreme Court struck down the emergency standard in January 2022, holding that Congress never granted OSHA power to impose sweeping public health measures under the guise of workplace safety. The decision reaffirmed the principle that regulatory agencies cannot unilaterally expand their power beyond what was explicitly authorized by law.
Beyond OSHA, vaccine mandates on the military, hospital employees, and federal employees and contractors wreaked further devastation. The military discharged service members who put their lives on the line for the country; hospitals fired healthcare workers during a national shortage who had bravely served on the front lines of the pandemic; and federal contractors were forced to terminate productive employees, including many who worked remotely and thus posed no risk of workplace transmission. Not only did these mandates fail to contain the pandemic, they also left millions of Americans feeling betrayed by their own government, undermining trust in public health agencies for a generation.
State-level mandates that inflicted similar harm were often mistakenly justified under the Supreme Court’s 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts ruling, which upheld a smallpox vaccine mandate. However, Jacobson dealt with a deadlier disease and, critically, its ruling was based on the vaccine’s ability to “prevent the spread of smallpox.” By contrast, Covid-19 vaccines do not confer sterilizing immunity, meaning they do not fully prevent transmission. This key distinction undermines the legal justification for mandating vaccinations, because it means getting a vaccine will help the person vaccinated but will not help any third parties. The failure to acknowledge this fundamental difference further eroded public confidence in health policy decisions.
Vaccine mandates were never about public health and had no basis in science. Rather, the mandates were motivated by hubris and control. Even though the FDA only approved the vaccines for “emergency use,” state and federal officials ignored the statutory restrictions that accompanied such limited approval. The vaccines carried then-unknown risks because front-end safety testing was curtailed, but mandates were still applied to healthy populations like college students. Government officials apparently believed they were so infallible and benevolent that they should make private medical decisions for individuals. Or perhaps officials were so frightened, they were willing to trample constitutional principles to avoid perceived risks. Either way, the courts sometimes stopped them but too often did not.
April 10, 2025