Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore.

Our goal is to bring evidence and experience

to illuminate critical public health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send

an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future

podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call, and today Stephanie Desmond talks to Michelle Mello, a professor of law and public policy at Stanford University.

They discuss vaccine mandates, how effective they are, how practical they are, and what the

mixed success of COVID vaccine mandates could mean for any future pandemic.

Let's listen.

Michelle Mello, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

So you are an expert on vaccine mandates.

And so I really want to talk to you today about how effective COVID vaccine mandates have been in improving vaccination rates and reducing disease.

So we don't have a great deal of what I might call hard evidence about that.

I'm not aware yet of studies that have systematically examined the impact of employer mandates,

which is mostly what we've had today,

managed through large employers and through federal contractors.

So mostly what we have is accumulating reports from different entities that have

imposed vaccination requirements.

And what we hear in those reports is that there's very high levels of compliance with the requirement. Opt-out rates are low. And so if the question is,

...