Are Covid vaccine mandates ethical? Here’s what medical experts think

Julian Savulescu, director of Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the main ground for implementing coercive measures during a pandemic was preventing harm to other people.

“You’re not entitled to shoot a gun into the air risking harm to other people and likewise, you can’t shoot Covid that might kill other people into a crowd,” he said in a phone call.

But according to Savulescu, four ethical conditions must be met to justify coercive policies like vaccine or mask mandates.

“First of all, the problem has to be significant, so you have to have a grave emergency or real risk of harming people. Secondly, you have to have a safe and effective intervention,” he told CNBC. “Thirdly, [the outcome] has to be better than fewer liberties and more restrictive measures. And lastly, the level of coercion has to be proportionate to the level of risk and the safety and effectiveness of the intervention.”

Savulescu said in his opinion, mandating Covid vaccines for an entire population did not meet those requirements. As the immunizations are not 100% effective at reducing transmission, he said they do not provide an extra level of protection to others that warrant such an extreme level of coercion.

“But there’s a second way in which you can justify coercion, which is less common, and that is when you’ve got a health system that will collapse if you don’t prevent people getting sick,” he said. “Then you can use coercion to stop people getting sick, not to prevent them infecting other people, but to stop them using that limited healthcare resource in an emergency.”

This could be used to justify making Covid vaccines compulsory, he said, but only when the policy was applied to the people who were most likely to require hospitalization or intensive care if they contracted the virus.

Vivek Cherian, a physician at Amita Health, agreed that to be ethically justified, the overall benefit of a vaccine mandate needed to outweigh the risk involved.

“The ethical dilemma, particularly in the United States, is the inherent conflict between an individual’s autonomy and liberty and the value to public health,” he said. “Given that if more people are vaccinated [it would] lead to fewer deaths, there is an ethical justification of the overall good.”

But in the U.S., Cherian said, there was “virtually zero chance we are going to see universally required vaccine mandates.”

“This is because we don’t currently have it for any vaccines,” he said. “What we will most likely witness are certain communities requiring it, such as federal workers, the military, or individual businesses. States will likely eventually mandate Covid vaccine requirements to attend public schools, in addition to the many other vaccines that are currently required.”

While the countries introducing nationwide vaccine mandates are in the minority, several countries —…