Study Suggests That COVID Vaccine Mandates Created Greater Skepticism About Non-COVID Vaccines

I remember back in the days of the pandemic when I was excited about there being COVID vaccines. It meant that we could, at least in theory, put the pandemic behind us and find at least a semblance of a pre-pandemic normal. Yes, I was hesitant about getting a COVID vaccine, but once sifting through the science and getting past the hesitancy, I felt comfortable enough to get my vaccine. 

Although I had been in favor of COVID vaccines, that did not mean I was in favor of vaccine mandates. That is part of being libertarian. Simply because I think something is good personally does not mean I think that the government should force it onto people. That had been my take on this issue: I was in favor of COVID vaccines, but I was also against vaccine mandates. As a study from BJM illustrates (see figure below), there were potential negative unintended consequences (Bardosh et al., 2022). 

In September 2021, I created a list of ten reasons as to why the government should not mandate COVID vaccines. One of those reasons was that it would erode trust in the government. The vaccine mandates ended up having a spillover effect of distrust. It is not only regulatory oversight that fewer people trust. This excerpt came from a recent study from the National Academies of Science (Rains and Richards, 2024) and gives yet another reason to be against vaccine mandates:

We used state-level data from the CDC to test whether vaccine mandates predicted changes in COVID-19 vaccine uptake, as well as related voluntary behaviors involving COVID-19 boosters and seasonal influenza vaccines. Results showed that COVID-19 vaccine adoption did not significantly change in the weeks before and after states implemented vaccine mandates, suggesting that mandates did not directly impact COVID-19 vaccination. Compared to states that banned vaccine restrictions, however, states with mandates had lower levels of COVID-19 booster adoption as well as adult and child flu vaccination. 

The first finding here is that vaccine mandates did not incentivize or accelerate vaccine intake. What is worse is the second finding: vaccine mandates are likely to have disincentivized people to take COVID-19 boosters and flu vaccinations. Why did people resist? To quote the authors, "the theory of psychological reactance serves as one longstanding explanation for why freedom restrictions in the form of governmental mandates cause people to reject the advocated behavior or otherwise have unintended consequences." 

In other words, this visceral reaction to vaccine mandates was entirely predictable (also see Mtimkulu-Eyde et al., 2022). If individuals feel that their freedoms are unduly being infringed upon, the more likely they will retaliate. Vaccine mandates are part of a larger pattern of public health policy throughout the COVID pandemic. 

We were told to lock down large swathes of the economy, even though there was no evidence that lockdowns work. On the contrary, prevailing pandemic guidance right before the pandemic told us not to implement lockdowns. It turns out lockdowns caused much more harm than prevented it. There was more opposition to face masks as it became clearer that face masks are not effective in preventing COVID transmission. A similar phenomenon happened with school closures, travel bans, and figuring out whether COVID vaccines would prevent COVID transmission. 

What was becoming plain as day as the pandemic progressed was that the powers that be who were bludgeoning the people with "Follow the Science" were in fact ignoring the science. I would contend that by the time the vaccine mandates came around, people were fed up with pandemic restrictions that were not based in science. It is "too little, too late" that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was initially a proponent of vaccine mandates, admitted in a congressional testimony this year that COVID vaccines are likely to have increased vaccine hesitancy for years to come. 

This is what happens when you politicize a pandemic and, by extension, a vaccine. People are less likely to trust public health officials to give basic health guidance in the future. More to the point, people feel distrust about other vaccines that have nothing to do with COVID. Vaccine opt-outs were already increasing prior to the pandemic (Hargreaves et al., 2020), but COVID vaccine mandates made matters worse. If this trend indeed holds out in the medium-to-long-term, do not be surprised that we see outbreaks of diseases we thought were relics of the past, whether that is measles or polio. That is the power that Big Government has when playing fast and loose with emergency powers and thinking they know what is best for our health.