In striking down the president’s ability to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for U.S. government employees, a New Orleans federal appeals court has handed a victory to infectious disease.
Part of the court’s reasoning hinges on the argument that the decision to get vaccinated is a private medical decision unrelated to employment, as if viruses could be stopped at the door of federal buildings like lost tourists. In truth, whether or not to receive a COVID-19 vaccine is a choice that reverberates well beyond the individual, particularly in congregate settings such as workplaces.
It could well be argued that your employer, whether private or public, couldn’t force you to receive treatment for cancer or an autoimmune disease; those afflictions, terrible as they might be, can’t hurt others around you. Preventive measures against a highly contagious aggressive pathogen that is constantly evolving to become more infectious and more deadly and which can easily kill your coworkers — some, like older folks, much more readily than others — is an entirely different proposition.
This particular case is rendered mainly academic by the fact that the vast majority of the federal workforce has already been vaccinated and the COVID emergency is set to end on May 11 anyway, making the fallout basically moot. For now, that is. Every epidemiologist and researcher that studies infectious disease will tell you that it’s only a matter of time until we get another disease as deadly and spreadable, or worse, than COVID, and at that point the federal government will again have to safeguard public health.
To leave it without the crucial tool of mandating that the roughly two million workers under its purview, working in communities across the United States, take the available safe and medically recommended steps to mitigate the emergency is shortsighted and irresponsible. The judges have failed to lay out a cogent rationale as to why the chief executive of the government lacks the ability to issue workplace safety directives to his employees. Public health is the victim.
