For political leaders looking for a wedge issue, vaccine mandates/shaming is the new "go-to" for consolidating your base. Justin Trudeau has deployed it to help with his snap election. President Biden, after resisting Republican's bait for months, decided to jump into the fray a couple weeks ago. Leaving aside personal views on the topic, a good question is, "do vaccine mandates even work?" There is no doubt they probably do for a lot of hoity toity maître d's in Manhattan that needed a new line other than "and you are....?" But really, do they actually inspire people to get vaccinated so they can get into their neighborhood pub?
It would appear not.
New York City has had a vaccine mandate since early August. In New York County, the very commendable trajectory continues with no clear sign that the public is responded to a mandate. Granted, an 80% vaccination rate for the first course of a series is pretty hard to best no matter what the incentive. In Queens County, the rate is a bit lower overall but the trajectory also suggests no inflection driven by an order from the Mayor. (Note, overall the nation saw an uptick in the second course after President Biden's announcement that mandates were forthcoming.)
It is, of course, important to encourage vaccination as much as possible but a public health blind spot continues to vex that effort. Mandating vaccination for visits to restaurants, bars, museums and other attractions presupposes the everyone, or almost everyone, does that sort of thing. It ignores activities in private venues like homes. Or to quote a bar owner I know here in Nashville, "[public health rules] move activity from a regulated environment to an unregulated one." (Note 2: vaccination mandates appear to be working as intended for international travel.)
The data appears to endorse that view for now.
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
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