How far away are we from employers mandating that employees be vaccinated?

Airlines saying you want to fly with us. We're going to need proof.

I think many businesses are going to say you want to come to work.

You got to show proof of vaccination.

Dollar General said on Wednesday it won't require the vaccine for its employees,

but it will pay them the equivalent of four hours wages to get the vaccine.

There's been a lot of talk lately about how employers and the government can help increase the number of people who get the COVID-19 vaccines.

The reason this is so important is that suppressing the spread of the virus is going to require vaccinating a significant portion of the US population.

They say between 70 to 85% of all Americans.

It's a moving target, dependent, and how contagious the virus is at any given point.

But what happens if we fall short of that number? What options do we really have if not enough Americans voluntarily get the vaccine?

On today's episode, we're going to look at a controversial proposal that's been floated, mandating the vaccines.

Can the United States require people to get this vaccine and would that be a good idea?

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent, and this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

My mentors told me at the beginning of the pandemic that as the state of the world goes down, the need for bioethics goes up, and certainly the last year has been proof of that.

That's Professor Emily Largent. She's an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and she's also an assistant professor of law.

I think just as much as my personal life has been affected by the pandemic, my professional life has really focused on COVID-19 and thinking about various ethical implications, of which there have been many.

Including, most recently, vaccine mandates.

So I asked her the big question at the center of this debate. Can the government require adults to get vaccinated?

So the short answer is yes. I think that ethically it's more complicated than that, but legally, at least we do have good reason to think that the government can require us to be vaccinated.

And that goes all the way back to a 1905 Supreme Court case called Jacobson versus Massachusetts.

In that case, there was a man heading Jacobson, and he really did not want to be vaccinated against smallpox, which was being required by Cambridge, Massachusetts because of widespread cases.

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