Opinion: A solution to the murky legal status of vaccine mandates: rewrite vaccine EUAs
It has been quite a week for vaccine mandates in the United States. The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (the president’s lawyer) expressed its opinion that it is legal to mandate vaccination with vaccines distributed under emergency use authorization. The Department of Veterans Affairs became the first federal agency to mandate Covid-19 vaccination for its frontline health care workers. New York City and the state of California declared vaccination or regular Covid-19 testing obligatory for their workforces.
Vaccination is the key weapon in our nation’s battle against Covid-19. Either we quickly get closer to full immunity as a nation or we are doomed to another fall and winter of school shutdowns, business closures, fewer recreational opportunities, and more masking and social distancing, with all the likely deaths that new strains of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, entail.
