The science is clear: COVID-19 vaccines drastically reduce the chance of hospitalization or death from the disease and will help us get out of the pandemic that’s claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S. But even so, months after the shots became available for all adults in the country, tens of millions remained unvaccinated.
That brought us to a new moment in the public health crisis: vaccine mandates. To boost the number of vaccine takers, President Joe Biden announced in early September 2021 that all large, private employers with at least 100 employees will have to require that their workers get vaccinated or otherwise face weekly testing.
Though school and healthcare workers have long been required to get vaccinated for a number of diseases—like measles, mumps, and rubella (the MMR vaccination) or even the flu—the upcoming COVID requirements are much more extensive in nature. “We’ve had vaccine mandates before, but they haven’t been quite as broadly applied,” says Carmel Shachar, the executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Because of this, it’s not immediately clear how they’ll work.
