Slightly less than half of adults in the United States believe the coronavirus vaccine should be mandatory for everyone, with only a few exceptions, new survey data shows.
Public health experts from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Denver found that 48.6% of adults believe the COVID-19 vaccine should be compulsory for all children going to school in person. In comparison, a smaller percentage of adults, 47.7%, believed employers should be allowed to mandate that workers get vaccinated.
Dr. Emily Largent, a medical ethics and health policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the report, told the Washington Examiner that mandates should still be considered a “last resort.”
“We do know historically in a very broad sweep that vaccine mandates have actually been associated with the rise of anti-vaccination movements and that it can create a lot of resistance,” Largent said.
Acceptance of vaccine mandates fell mainly upon party lines. The report, published in the science journal JAMA, found that the people most willing to get the vaccine are also vastly more likely to support mandatory vaccines in children. Nearly 74% of people who said they would get the shots also noted that students should have to get the shots before going to school. Meanwhile, only 23.7% of those people willing to get the vaccine said it should be compulsory for students.
“We really need to make sure that we’ve done everything we can to make sure that people are voluntarily taking [the vaccine], and then, only if we don’t have sufficient uptake in a reasonable period of time, I think we should start to think about mandates,” Largent said. “From experience, we know that [mandates] can be not only ineffective but backfire.”
When measles made a resurgence in 2019, killing roughly 1,300 people, state governments scrambled to boost confidence in the MMR vaccine and increase vaccinations, especially in children. The anti-vaccination movement gained momentum on social media, with people citing a disproven claim published in a 1998 study that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Parents primarily used this claim as a reason for taking advantage of religious and philosophical exemptions from the mandatory shots for their children.
As the rates of new measles cases and deaths rose drastically to the highest levels since 1992, Washington, Maine, and New York rescinded allowances for skipping the shots on religious grounds in 2019. About five years prior, Disneyland in California was the site of a significant measles outbreak that led California to remove all exemptions based on personal beliefs.
“There is good evidence that when you get rid of religious and philosophical exemptions for vaccines, the rates go up,” Largent said. “There was nice work out in California, for example, after the measles outbreak [in 2014 and 2015] where they did change some things, and we see that the rates of vaccination have gone up.”
While it seems counterintuitive, she added, allowing some exemptions for personal reasons bolsters the vaccination campaign’s legitimacy. The best way to boost the number of vaccines given is for government officials to make the authorization process as transparent as possible.
The federal government has tapped into the vaccine hesitancy felt by a large proportion of the U.S. population, given the vaccines’ accelerated developments. The Food and Drug Administration, the agency tasked with reviewing the safety and efficacy data from clinical trials, broadcast vaccine advisory panel meetings to discuss the authorizations of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in December. Largent added that it helps to see trusted officials get the shots publicly, as several have over the past few weeks.
“I’m hesitant to use the word like ‘anti-vaxxer,’ but some of the hesitancy we see is rooted in very real factors,” Largent said. “This is a new virus that’s unfamiliar to people … and so it’s not just sort of the usual concerns people have, but some of the hesitancy really reflects broader social factors around the pandemic itself.”
