Be it resolved, to promote public health, governments should mandate use of COVID-19 vaccines broadly in society.
The following is adapted from remarks made by Paul Offit and Martin Kulldorff in a Munk Debates podcast. Listen to the whole episode at: https://munkdebates.com/podcast/vaccine-mandates
We’ve done the hard part. We created a vaccine using a novel technology.
We were able to mass produce it, mass distribute it, and mass administer it. It’s safe, it’s free, it’s easily accessible. And when the vaccine first rolled out, we were giving one million doses a day, two million doses a day, three million doses a day until we finally hit a wall, which is where we are now.
We have a little over 50 percent of the American population that has been vaccinated, but there’s a solid 60 to 80 million people who are simply choosing not to get a vaccine. They are claiming personal freedoms. They argue that this is their right to not be vaccinated, that it’s their right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection.
Or said another way, that it’s the right to remain fertile ground for the spread of this virus to allow it to continue to do harm, to continue to cause suffering and hospitalization and death, continue to mutate, continue to potentially create variants that will be more and more resistant potentially to vaccine induced immunity.
The allusion to the fact that there are potential long-term consequences of the vaccine makes no sense. If you look at the history of vaccination over the last 200 years, while vaccines can cause serious adverse events that can cause permanent harm and even death, those events occur within two months of getting any dose of vaccine.
I know of no long-term effect where you find out something 10 years later, or 15 years later, that you didn’t know within, frankly, the first couple of months. You may only find it out when the vaccine is in millions of people, but you certainly know that its set will occur within a couple of months of the vaccine.
There is no advantage to natural infection, especially when you know that vaccination is remarkably effective. If you look at people who are vaccinated, they are 25 to 30-fold less likely to be hospitalized, less likely to die, and that also includes children.
And so we have two choices: we can stand back and say, “sure, that’s your right, and there’s really nothing we want to do to interfere with that right.” Or we can do what we’re starting to do, which is to mandate the vaccine, to compel people to do the right thing because they seem not to want to do the right thing on their own.
