Vaccine Mandates Likely Caused Greater Unemployment for Healthcare Workers

Although the COVID pandemic is further in the rearview mirror, especially with an upcoming presidential election, the effects of the policy response to the pandemic still remain. Lockdowns caused multiple negative outcomes, including lost educational attainment, greater mental health issues, greater food insecurity, erosion of liberal democracy, and wider economic inequality on the global scale, to name a few. The lockdowns were by far the biggest policy mistake during the COVID pandemic. I would call it the greatest peacetime public policy in human history. 

There was another policy decision that had unintended, negative consequences: the vaccine mandate. My position during the pandemic was that I was in favor of the vaccines but against the vaccine mandates. The opposition I had was strong enough where I created a list of 10 reasons to be against the COVID vaccine mandates. One of those reasons was that I was worried that a vaccine mandate would cause greater unemployment in the labor market. What about the labor market for healthcare workers specifically? 

This is a question that economists from George Mason University and William Paterson University answer with their paper, Promoting Public Health with Blunt Instruments: Evidence from Vaccine Mandates (Abouk et al., 2024). As the authors point out, it was unclear whether the vaccine mandates would incentivize or disincentivize healthcare workers to work. On the plus side, the perceived public safety could have relaxed worker shortages. On the other hand, there could be more workers that are skeptical of the vaccine, thereby creating a shortage. Here is how the state-level vaccine mandates played out for healthcare workers:

Our findings suggest that vaccine mandates may have worsened healthcare workforce shortage: following adoption of a state-level mandate, the probability of working in the healthcare industry declines by 6%. Effects are larger among workers in healthcare-specific occupations, who leave the industry at higher rates in response to mandates and are slower to be replaced than workers in non-healthcare occupations. 

In March, I detailed another negative unintended consequence of vaccine mandates: increased vaccine skepticism for all vaccines. Ignoring the scientific process, evidence, and cost-benefit analysis while propagating fear had an abysmally large amount of consequences that we feel to this day. If the findings of the aforementioned study end up being correct, then we are confounded with yet another unintended consequence of COVID-era policy stupidity. By trying to make things safer with the vaccine mandate, it looks like the vaccine mandates made things less safe by causing workers in a vital industry to leave. This once again shows the cure of good intentions is more than likely not worse than the disease itself, a lesson that seemingly continues to be lost on many public health officials.