Vaccines have been one of the most controversial public issues in Catholic bioethics in the past few years. It has been established that in most cases, there is an individual moral obligation to get recommended vaccines. However, this leaves open the question of mandating vaccines. There are many things we should each do where it’s not proper to issue a mandate from an authority, like an employer or government. This leads to a question about the ethics of vaccine mandates.
I wrote a chapter back in summer 2024 answering this question, and it was just published in a bioethics book. This article defends most existing vaccine mandates as serving the common good, but doesn’t advocate for every mandate. I generally see that mandates for RNA diseases like flu & covid only make sense in medical or military situations where risk is much higher, like hospital or nursing home staff, as they are less effective & need much more repetition. Widespread – almost universal – mandates make sense for DNA viruses, where after one or a few doses, protection over 90% is gained for decades.
Springer just published this chapter. I include the abstract and conclusion below.
Samples from “Vaccine Mandates Serve the Common Good”
Here is the abstract:
Vaccines are one of the few medical procedures that are usually more for the common good than the individual good of the patient. As we can more often require people to serve the common good than their own particular good, vaccines are the most often mandated medical procedure. These mandates can be of different levels, such as for staff or individuals in high-risk places, for travels to/from a country, or for almost the whole population like public school vaccine mandates. This chapter explores the ethics of vaccine mandates, indicating both the ethics of existing mandates and principles for possible future mandates. To force someone to act for the common good, there must be a great advantage to the common good compared to the little danger or disadvantage to them: it must be substantially more than what might be taken from the individual. Vaccines have a variety of factors that affect the common or individual good, including the mode and probability of disease transmission, disease danger, disease change cycle, vaccine efficacy, dangers of vaccine side-effects, the mandate’s breadth, etc. This chapter argues in favor of most existing mandates and many proposed ones, but is not in support of every proposed mandate.
Here is the conclusion:
Writing about the history of the anti-vaccine movement, Wolfe and Sharpe (2002) explain, “Vaccination is unique among de facto mandatory requirements in the modern era, requiring individuals to accept the injection of a medicine or medicinal agent into their bodies, and it has provoked a spirited opposition. This opposition began with the first vaccinations, has not ceased, and probably never will.” This does create a situation where more objections to this can arise than to say speed limits or compulsory elementary education. However, such objections do not indicate that vaccine mandates are contrary to the common good. In fact, they often point to a lack of or poor education on how vaccine mandates serve the common good.
Vaccines clearly serve the common good. Given we vaccinate for others, not just ourselves, vaccine mandates can also serve the common good. This is especially true when such a mandate can achieve herd immunity or the end of endemic disease spread. Most if not all existing mandates in the US and Canada serve the common good to a degree that is justified. However, based on various factors, not every mandate would serve the common good. Serving the common good also allows some limited exemptions to vaccine mandates.
I invite you to read this on Springer. If you don’t have institutional access and want to read it, request access on ResearchGate, and I will give it to you. This is a dense academic article with 123 footnotes in 20 pages, complex sentences, and a decent background knowledge presumed.
I really hope this helps the discussion and explains to people why vaccine mandates are good. I hope to make a more popular and less academic version of this later to help people in that respect. I realize this is beyond much of my regular audience.
