203 - Can COVID-19 Vaccines Be Mandatory in the US and Who Decides?
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Once COVID-19 vaccines are widely available, could they be made mandatory and, if so, what entities could enforce this? Legal and public health expert Joanne Rosen talks with Stephanie Desmon about the legislative precedent for mandatory vaccinations that dates all the way back to a 1905 Supreme Court case after a smallpox outbreak in Massachusetts. They also discuss other strategies states could consider to achieve widespread vaccination for COVID-19.
KEYWORDS: vaccine mandates; policy
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins |
| 0:11.6 | Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:18.8 | and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:21.9 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day |
| 0:27.3 | through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public |
| 0:32.5 | health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, |
| 0:38.4 | please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:43.1 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:49.4 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Joanne Rosen, |
| 0:53.0 | director of the Johns Hopkins Clinic for Public Health |
| 0:55.8 | Law and Policy about the COVID-19 vaccine. Their topic is the law of vaccine mandates. |
| 1:04.0 | Let's listen. Joanne Rosen, thanks so much for joining me. You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here, |
| 1:08.8 | Stephanie. So today we're going to talk |
| 1:11.1 | about sort of the legal questions surrounding vaccination. And my first question is, once a COVID |
| 1:17.3 | vaccine or vaccines are made available, could states mandate that people get them? The short answer |
| 1:23.7 | to the question is, yes, states have the legal and constitutional authority |
| 1:29.3 | to require that the people who live in that state be vaccinated or to introduce a vaccine mandate. |
| 1:37.3 | And interestingly, the authority for the state being able to compel vaccination, |
| 1:45.4 | the affirmation of that authority goes all the way back to a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1905 |
| 1:53.3 | called Jacobson v. Massachusetts. |
| 1:57.4 | In that case, arose in the midst of an outbreak of smallpox. |
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