Vaccine mandates are constitutional

The argument

Vaccines should be made mandatory, this argument holds, because the government has the right to make them so — the objection that a mandate exceeds legitimate state authority has already been tested and rejected. The US Supreme Court has heard several challenges to these mandates, and the Courts have maintained that they are constitutional because federal and local governments have a duty to protect their citizens. That duty is the hinge of the reasoning: a government charged with protecting the public must possess the means to do it, or the duty is empty. Practice has followed the doctrine. State and local governments in the United States have mandated immunisations as a prerequisite for attending public schools for quite some time, which makes the mandate an established feature of United States law rather than a novel intrusion. The governing principle, as the argument states it, is that the government has the power to impose reasonable regulations to protect the public health even when such regulations impose on individual rights. The qualifier matters — the power is to impose reasonable regulations, not any regulation at all — and the recognition that rights are burdened is built into the test rather than denied by it. The underlying reason such a burden is permissible here is that the choice is not self-contained. Vaccines may impose on individual rights, but vaccination is not an individual choice, because the decision to vaccinate or not has consequences beyond the person making it: when people choose against vaccination they can make others sick, and in the most extreme cases cause death. That is where the liberty objection runs out. Vaccines should be mandatory because the right to individual liberties does not include the liberty to harm others — and the courts, on this argument, have consistently said so.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Vaccines should not be made mandatory because vaccine mandates are inherently unconstitutional. For instance, the First Amendment text states that Congress can not make laws "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." There are many people who do not want to be vaccinated because it is against their religious values and morals. Several religions oppose vaccines and mandatory vaccinations. One such example is The Church of Illumination; they state that “the teachings of the Church unequivocally affirm that injections of vaccines and inoculations are a violation of these biblical teachings… Immunizations and vaccinations are a form of blood pollution." If the government were to force these people to get vaccinated, the government would be imposing on their individual rights. Vaccines should not be made mandatory because such mandates will interfere with rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The case law is narrower than the premise implies. Jacobson v. Massachusetts upheld a modest state-level penalty during an outbreak and Zucht v. King settled school-entry requirements; neither establishes a general federal power, and later mandate litigation has turned largely on whether a particular agency had statutory authority rather than on a broad constitutional licence. [Rejecting P2] The harm principle is doing work the premise does not defend: the strength of the third-party interest varies with the disease, with how much transmission vaccination prevents, and with what alternatives exist — and every state requirement carries medical and often religious or philosophical exemptions the argument never mentions. The deeper problem is that both premises answer a different question. Constitutionality settles what a government may do, not what it should, and the position needs the second claim.