Are COVID-19 vaccine mandates human rights violations?

The article "Are COVID-19 vaccine mandates human rights violations?" was first published on 24th August 2021 and has been updated on 31st January 2022.

Even Napoleon couldn’t force everyone to get vaccinated.

The French strongman managed to bend most of Europe to his will, yet when it came to smallpox he could merely encourage his compatriots to get immunized against the deadly disease as a civic duty.

In some ways, not much has changed. Governments and private-sector employers around the world have encouraged those fortunate enough to have access to COVID-19 vaccines to take them – often with civic-minded prompts similar to Napoleon’s, but increasingly through targeted vaccine mandates.

These measures help keep people safe. But they’ve also touched a nerve.

In Canada, thousands of people gathered in Ottawa this past weekend to protest the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates, spontaneously building on what had started as a more narrow demonstration staged by truck drivers.

The rally in Canada was only the most recent unrest. After the French government sought to make vaccination virtually unavoidable with rules and mandates, a nationwide protest drew nearly 240,000 people. Parents in South Korea have protested vaccine mandates in schools, and an estimated 16,000 people turned out in Hamburg earlier this month to protest vaccination rules.

Protests against private-sector mandates have also cropped up, though companies like Google and Citigroup have steadfastly required employees to get jabbed before coming to the office.

Some argue COVID-19 vaccine mandates are human rights violations. Not really, say experts on actual human rights violations.

In fact, some point to the more fundamental right of everyone to be protected from COVID-19 – particularly as variants continue to disproportionately impact the unvaccinated.

In the mid-19^th century, the British government made vaccination against smallpox compulsory. Local Anti-Vaccination Leagues were formed in response, brandishing the same hesitancy and uneven understanding of science that recur among anti-vaccination activists today. In many ways, not much is new.

Yet, some things about vaccine mandates do seem to have changed in recent decades.

When a successful polio vaccine candidate was announced in 1953, it made its developer a minor celebrity; parents quickly sought it out for their children without needing coercion. Seven years later, Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” was awarded to “US Scientists.”

But then science became intertwined with the Cold War and government secrecy. Laboratories were bombed, a superfluous and flawed swine flu vaccination effort left dozens of people with a rare neurological disorder, and Soviet disinformation about the origins of AIDS – an epidemic that’s still claiming hundreds of thousands of lives every year – spread around the world. Seeds of doubt were sown everywhere.

So, COVID-19 vaccine mandates may certainly seem like an attractive option to help stem the spread of the disease, as long as everyone affected has equal access (and credible exemptions are possible).

But perhaps a more foundational effort is necessary to rebuild trust in science – potentially making mandates unnecessary.

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