EXPLAINED IN 600 WORDS

The success of vaccine mandates

In much of the country, many Americans are running into a new reality: They now have to be vaccinated — to keep a job, travel, or go to a favorite restaurant or bar.

It’s the result of more organizations, from individual employers to the federal government, mandating vaccines. President Joe Biden in September announced a federal mandate, calling on employers with 100-plus workers to require vaccines (with an alternative for weekly testing). Major cities, from New York City to Los Angeles, have rules for “vaccine passports” to enter indoor businesses.

So is this all actually working to increase vaccination rates?

The answer, it seems, is yes. With mandates taking effect for the first time in recent weeks, daily vaccine doses nationwide have gone up — to nearly 1 million a day.

A chart showing vaccination rates in the US.

It’s not right to say that mandates are the only cause of the increase, especially with recent authorizations of booster shots by the feds. But there’s good reason to believe that mandates are playing some role.

For one, there are the anecdotes. I’ve heard multiple stories from friends and colleagues about vaccine-reluctant peers getting shots because they were needed to, in their words, “do anything anymore.”

The anecdotes include conservatives, who are typically more vaccine-hesitant. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) admitted on Fox News that he got vaccinated, even though he would have preferred not to, because it was going to be required for his job on the Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees in the House.

But the best proof comes from the employers requiring vaccines, which have seen surges of workers getting their shots in recent weeks. Some examples:

In New York state, vaccination rates for hospital and nursing home staff increased from 75 percent to more than 90 percent after a mandate was instituted.
At Adventist Health in conservative-leaning Kern County, California, vaccination rates went from 60 percent to 90 percent after a mandate.
About 95 percent of New York City’s full-time school staff are now vaccinated. Perhaps most tellingly, the police officers who have to work in the school, and therefore get the vaccine, have a rate of 82 percent, while the police force as a whole is at 67 percent.
Novant Health in North Carolina suspended just 1 percent of its workforce — nearly 400 workers — for not getting vaccinated. Within a week, more than half of those workers returned to their jobs after getting a shot.

One thing that’s notable about these numbers is how high they are. For a country in which about 78 percent of people 18 and older have gotten at least one shot, vaccination rates of 90 percent or more are genuinely impressive.

Yet maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. Since the vaccine rollout began, the Kaiser Family Foundation has been asking people about their willingness to get vaccinated — and, for all of 2021, around a quarter to a third of the most resistant have said they would get the vaccine if it was required.

Previous studies, in health care and school settings, have found vaccine mandates boost vaccination rates — more so than softer approaches. The country’s high vaccination rates for children across many diseases, from polio to measles to chickenpox, are partly due to school-based mandates.

Vaccine mandates aren’t without any costs. They do involve sacrificing a semblance of individual liberty — they are the government or an employer telling you to put something in your body.

But as Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in a 1905 ruling upholding vaccine mandates, “Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”

And we’re now seeing real-time proof that the mandates do reduce the chances of injury to others.

PAPER OF THE WEEK

The disparate effect of Covid-19 lockdowns

A new study in Annals of the American Association of Geographers compares the travel patterns of people in Columbus, Ohio, before the pandemic and during it.

Researchers Armita Kar, Huyen Le, and Harvey Miller confirm a lot of what people would expect: Travel as a whole declined, with people limiting their trips to more essential places.

But by analyzing local travel patterns across different socioeconomic clusters, the researchers managed to pull out how travel changed among various income groups during the lockdown period of March and April 2020.

In general, those on the higher end of the socioeconomic ladder traveled more widely for all purposes before the pandemic, but narrowed their travel to shorter and more local trips during the lockdown period. Those in the middle followed a similar track, although to a lesser extent.

Meanwhile, those at the lower end of socioeconomic status tended to have pretty limited travel patterns before the pandemic — a reflection of low access to, say, cars or public transportation. So while their rate of travel decreased, it wasn’t as big of a drop as the other groups.

But those on the lower end of the scale appeared to travel longer distances. The authors suggested that was likely a result of lost or more limited job opportunities during the lockdown, particularly fewer work-from-home jobs than wealthier individuals could find.

The study is a reminder that the pandemic didn’t actually drive everyone to work from home; in fact, most Americans didn’t work from home last year. And it provides one explanation for why disadvantaged groups were hit harder by the pandemic last year: They didn’t have the luxury to adopt at least some of the recommended precautions.