Ignore the Headlines. Vaccination Mandates Work.
Employers across the country are requiring workers to stop procrastinating and get vaccinated. And that’s exactly what workers are doing.
In the battle over employer vaccination mandates (whether imposed by private businesses, like United Airlines, or by governments on public employees), the most common argument against the mandates has been a simple philosophical one: it’s wrong to force people to get vaccinated, since it should be their choice to do so or not. But along with it, opponents of mandates have also made an empirical argument: these mandates won’t actually work. People will quit rather than get a shot. So requiring people to get vaccinated as a condition of employment, they contend, won’t boost the vaccination rate at all.
This argument always seemed a bit implausible, given that we know vaccination requirements at schools have been incredibly effective at boosting vaccination rates for children, and given that we know a big chunk of unvaccinated Americans describe themselves as vaccine-hesitant (meaning they could be swayed) rather than ardently opposed. But there have been surveys where close to half of vaccine-hesitant workers said they would quit or look for another job if their employer put a mandate in place. And it’s easy to…
