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Can New York State force people to get COVID-19 vaccines?
"So why is a vaccine mandate happening for public college students but not nursing home staff?
"Guidelines from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission make it clear that private employers can make vaccinations a condition of employment as long as the underlying rationale is “job-related and consistent with business necessity.” However, the FDA also requires that vaccine administrators give recipients a fact sheet that informs them of their right to refuse a vaccine. That creates a paradox of sorts for any public agency (like the New York City Police Department) or private business (like many nursing homes) that want to require vaccinations while also administering them under the Emergency Use Authorization. Colleges do not face the same problem when it comes to issuing mandates on students because their mandate is contingent on the FDA granting full approval to the vaccines by the fall.
The state could theoretically do the same for everyone else – just not until the vaccines are officially authorized. At least one public sector union leader has also noted how organized labor might also have to sign off on what type of disciplinary actions could be taken against vaccine scofflaws protected by collective bargaining agreements."
What sort of backlash might materialize against such ideas?
"There are a few signs that opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates could be even more fierce than the pushback against the 2019 law ending the religious exemption, which came within one vote of dying in an Assembly committee. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines range from pseudo-scientific concerns about its safety to more mainstream civil liberties. “It should be an individual's choice as to whether they want to receive the vaccine,” Republican Assembly Member Mike Reilly of Staten Island tweeted earlier this month. While GOP members of legislative minorities have little say about what gets passed, that has not stopped Republican Assembly Member David DiPietro of Western New York from submitting two bills (here and here) to preclude any statewide vaccine mandate...
...public health experts say governments at all levels should exhaust their options before pursuing sweeping mandates. “When enforcement capacity is limited or nonexistent, mandates cannot be properly implemented and are thus unlikely to promote public health and safety,” Carmel Shachar, a bioethicist at Harvard Law School, and Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, a law professor at UC Hastings College of Law, wrote last year in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. “Moreover, mandates can backfire if a population resents being coerced and has not received sufficient education about the safety, efficacy, and public health importance of vaccinations.” The civil rights implications alone should make policymakers think twice before approving any future vaccine mandates, according to Allie Bohm, policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, unless they do everything they can to make sure that vaccine mandates do not exacerbate existing political, social, economic and racial divisions. “How do you know you're making sure that you're enforcing fairly and that you're enforcing evenly?” she said in an interview. “It’s another really important thing to think about.”