Vaccines: who can force you to get vaccinated?

There are anomalies between states (states with lower vaccination rates tend to be more Republicans) and within states. But other countries could not dream of these numbers.

The question is when will be sufficiently vaccinated to protect the country.

And that will take a little bit of pressure and pushing, especially with young Americans.

I read a CNN report that quoted Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, about the difficulty of getting young people especially to get vaccinated.

“The problem is, they feel invincible and that makes them a difficult group to reach,” she said. The rest of the story is that she was unable to immunize her own children.

“I’m still working on it and shaming them every day,” she jokes.

If you isolate only Americans under 30 and assume recent vaccination rates, only 57.5% of people under 30 will have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine by the end of August, according to a projection.

Carrots to get vaccinated. We are all familiar with the freebies, raffles, lotteries and other complicity that government and business have concocted to get the disinterested and disgruntled to roll up their sleeves.

Things are starting to get more straightforward. As in, if you don’t get the vaccine, you can’t study or work here.

Sticks for the unvaccinated. As a CNN report suggests, “What ultimately can speed up efforts with this age group is college. More than 500 universities and colleges require students to be vaccinated against Covid-19 before returning to class, according to a tally kept by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “

But not all students have it. In a closely watched case, eight Indiana University students went to federal court to challenge the school’s requirement that students be vaccinated before starting the fall term.

The school relaxed state law by requiring vaccination, but not documentation of vaccination. The students argue that this is irrelevant.

“They are suing because they are deprived of their constitutional rights to make medical treatment decisions for themselves and to protect their own bodily integrity. After all, they are adults and they would like to weigh the risks and consequences of the disease. vaccination or get Covid, ”James Bopp Jr., lead counsel for the plaintiffs, told CNN’s Ana Cabrera.

An interesting question that the courts might answer is whether state universities – the congregation points for this unvaccinated young cohort – are arms of the state.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by more than 100 employees against the Houston Methodist Hospital, which required employees to be vaccinated in order to keep their jobs. The employees appealed against the decision.

It is obviously important to follow these lawsuits, but it is also important to recognize the extent of the dissatisfaction, which in fact appears to be quite low.

It is a problem of less than 1%. Excerpt from the CNN report: Houston Methodist CEO Marc Boom said earlier this month that 24,947 employees were fully vaccinated.

LaTricia Blank, an ultrasound technologist, is one of the terminated employees. She argued to CNN’s Erin Burnett that the three vaccines used in the United States had only gotten emergency use approval from the FDA and she fears they may have gone through a rushed process.

“You are not going to refuse a patient and give him care if he does not have a vaccine. Do not take my choice away from me,” she said.

There is no doubt that companies have the option of employing only people who have been vaccinated after a decision in December by the Federal Commission for Equal Employment Opportunities, which made it clear that companies can legally require that all employees returning to the workplace and new recruits be vaccinated for Covid-19. Exceptions should be allowed for disabilities and religious reasons. More on that here.

RELATED: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, require in-person return-to-work vaccines.

A 116-year-old precedent: States can impose vaccines. It is not known how long or even if these matters will travel to the United States Supreme Court, but it is noteworthy that the history of the court’s most important vaccine tenure dates back to 1905, when the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, fined people who refused to be vaccinated against smallpox in the amount of $ 5.

Pastor Henning Jacobson sued in 1902, arguing that “the compulsion to introduce disease into a healthy system (the vaccine) is a violation of liberty”.

It looks exactly like the students in Indiana today.

It took three years before the Supreme Court decided in 1905, in the words of Judge John Marshall Harlan, “according to the principle of self-defense, of primary necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members”. To learn more, see the National Constitution Center.

Courts take forever. This key Supreme Court decision was made a year before the United States Food and Drug Administration, which approves drugs today, was founded in 1906. Things have changed in 116 years!

A U.S. appeals court in Texas cited the Jacobson case when it ruled earlier in the pandemic that states can temporarily stop abortions.

Life and freedom. The difference today could be that many states in the United States, under Republican governors, are passing laws that protect freedom over public safety when it comes to vaccines.

There will certainly be two avenues for Americans, where the vaccinated have more freedom than the anti-vaccines. As CNN Travel notes, Disney parks in the United States are slowly relaxing their Covid-19 protocols. Face masks are now optional in most areas for California and Florida park guests who are fully vaccinated.

In the United States, it’s the honor system. Traveling in Europe is another story.

Everyone makes a choice about their own vaccination. But these choices have consequences, especially as the more contagious Delta variant is spreading across the country.

Epidemics still occur. The concern is that the variants slip between the vaccination holes. According to a CNN report: Even if 75% of eligible Americans were vaccinated, a Delta-type variant could cause Covid-19 to rebound from summer lows and cause more than 3,000 deaths per week in the United States at various times throughout the fall and winter, a recent research model shown.

Proof of this is the recent outbreaks in a Florida government office, where two people have died, and in a county in Wyoming preparing for a rodeo.

How epidemics occur today. We are learning more about this Florida office outbreak, which allegedly started with a computer scientist, then “spread to four colleagues in the department, who were unvaccinated and unmasked. But another colleague who had contact direct and exposure to patient zero was uninfected because he was vaccinated.

The wife of a victim said they had both considered getting the vaccine but were still concerned about things they believed were unknown.

“We were just doing research and trying to track the vaccine, we just weren’t ready yet,” she said.

The guilt tactic: every new death is preventable. This is the case of the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, on Tuesday during a briefing at the White House. Vaccines, she argued, “are almost 100% effective against serious illness and death – meaning that almost all deaths from Covid-19 are particularly tragic, as almost all deaths, in especially in adults, due to preventable Covid-19. “

We will talk about these vaccines for a long time. Boosters will likely be needed, for example, in the years to come. There are new vaccines online that could be just as effective and potentially less controversial.

There remains the very real question of when children under 12 will receive the vaccine, as the medical community considers the rare cases of heart inflammation (less than one in a million) in adolescents who have received it. The cases of inflammation appeared to be mild and resolved quickly.

In the meantime, the government will try to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.

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