All sides of the debate about vaccine mandates should be more discerning and less absolutist. The radical anti-mandate side, though — the one that opposes such requirements in any circumstance — is taking a monstrously immoral and deadly position.
Specifically, any public employee in a public safety-related job absolutely ought to be expected to be vaccinated unless a medical condition makes vaccination unwise, or perhaps unless the person is already presumed to have natural immunity due to a documented prior COVID-19 case.
One can be a freedom-loving, small-government conservative, opposed to most state-sponsored coronavirus mandates, and still readily support a vaccine imperative for most police, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, and other public health personnel. Indeed, everyone ought to support vaccine mandates for those workers.
It is beyond dispute that state governments have the authority to require vaccines for the sake of public health. All 50 states require immunizations for diphtheria, tetanus, polio, chickenpox, measles, and rubella for public school kindergarteners. A number of states also require various vaccines to attend public colleges, and many states require even influenza inoculations for state healthcare workers.
Frankly, a vaccine mandate for first responders and health workers is plain common sense. We know three things beyond a shadow of a doubt. We know that the vaccines are more than 90% effective against earlier variants of COVID-19 and at least 66% effective against the delta variant. We know the vaccine lessens the severity, often substantially, even of the delta variant, and that it lessens the likelihood of an infected person spreading the virus to others. But we also know that even those who are vaccinated can contract, suffer from, and die from this disease if they are elderly or have any of a number of risk factors.
Every single public safety worker is subject to daily contact, often at close quarters, with both vaccinated and unvaccinated members of the public. As the “gestation” period for the coronavirus to become symptomatic is several days long, those workers may become both infected and contagious before they realize it. If contagious, they put at risk the other people with whom they come in contact.
The risk from a vaccinated public employee is tremendously lower than the risk from an unvaccinated one.
If you are a trooper and make an arrest, you could be infected by the arrestee. If, the next day, you stop at the scene of a traffic accident and help physically support a shaken but otherwise unhurt, elderly victim from her vehicle to a place where she can sit, you could spread the virus to her — even if she has tried to protect herself with the vaccine. As a citizen relying on a public service, she has every right to expect that a public employee will not put her at such risk.
A vaccine mandate for public employees is not intended as much for the protection of the employees as it is for protection of the public. It is a disordered society that would allow people expecting to be helped by healthcare workers and first responders to instead be sickened, perhaps to the point of hospitalization or even death, by those very workers.
If the government, which has the job of public safety, requires a coronavirus vaccine for public safety workers, those workers should recognize both a legal and a moral obligation to comply. Public employment is not a human or civic right. There is no “liberty interest” in retaining the capacity to infect other people with a dangerous illness.
And yes, if those employees won’t comply, they should be fired. They must be. Public safety demands it.
