Public support for vaccine mandates set by the federal government, businesses, and schools has fallen from about two-thirds to roughly one-half since September, the latest polling shows.
Updated polling from Morning Consult shows that approval of mandatory vaccinations sank to all-time lows during the week ending Feb. 6. While half of the public supports the mandates set by businesses, down from a high of 61% in September, only slightly more, 53%, support mandates in schools. That is down from a high of 66% in August. Public support for President Joe Biden’s embattled federal mandates hit 54%, down from its high of 66% in September.
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The fight over Biden’s mandate that large, private businesses require their employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine or be subjected to weekly testing has calmed since the Supreme Court blocked it on Jan. 13. The mandate for businesses, which would have been enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, sparked a fierce debate between Democrats and Republicans over the president’s authority to force people to get shots. The conservative majority on the court ruled 6-3 against the mandate, arguing that Biden “lacked authority to impose the mandate.”
The court did, however, uphold the administration’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers whose employers receive funding from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
School vaccine mandates are a similarly treacherous issue, with 17 states dominated by Republicans passing legislation that explicitly bans mandates in schools. Meanwhile, only California and Louisiana, as well as the District of Columbia, have instituted far-reaching mandates for students. California’s mandate will go into effect at the start of the next school year and apply to all K-12 students, while Louisiana’s gives parents the option to exempt their children if they can get a written objection from a medical provider.
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“It is worth noting that while many of the diseases on the public health immunization schedule were once both rampant and deadly, they are no longer serious risks for school age children in Louisiana,” Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said in December. “This is true because almost everyone was vaccinated against these diseases, many as a condition for attending elementary school.”
Biden, who started out his term with the promise that the coronavirus pandemic would soon be behind us, suffered a huge blow when the court threw out the OSHA mandate, which gave state Republicans strong ideological footing to object to mandates at the local level.
The issue of mandates in schools is expected to remain a contentious one, as individual districts in many states have the power to add the COVID-19 vaccine to their lists of required immunizations for in-person attendance. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, had to postpone enforcement of its mandate, initially set to be implemented last month, when confronted with 30,000 children who would have had to remain in virtual classrooms.
