You're listening to the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian

is Professor Richard Epstein. Richard of course is the Peter and Kirsten

Bedford senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution. He's the Lawrence A Tish

Professor of Law at NYU and he's a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

And we have a lot to talk about today because President Biden has just finished announcing a new vaccine mandate as a part of a six-part COVID-19 plan.

Now in addition to mandating that all federal workers, staffers at hospitals that accept

Medicaid and Medicare funding and public educators be vaccinated,

President Biden announced a vaccine mandate for all private employees

who work in businesses with at least 100 workers,

or they have to show weekly negative COVID tests. It's expected to affect hundred workers.

It's expected to affect about 80 million workers in the private sector.

Now the rule will be enforced through OSHA in the Department of Labor,

that's the department that governs worker safety.

Richard, there are many vaccine mandates in place right now across the United States.

Public schools have vaccine requirements. Those serving in the armed forces have to get vaccinated for a whole

host of things. So how is this mandate different from existing vaccine

mandates? That's actually a hard question. there's no easy answer to it.

But what you have to do is to ask yourself the following kind of question.

When you're talking about all these other vaccines, they seem to have had very long histories and the viruses or the particular conditions that they're trying to deal with are relatively constant.

So smallpox now, smallpox 200 years ago, are pretty much the same thing because the structure of the underlying

molecules give them a high degree of stability. When you start dealing with this

particular virus, one of the things about it is it turns out to be something that mutates fairly frequently.

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