Mandating Clinician COVID-19 Vaccination May Hinder Population-Level Uptake

Health care worker vaccine hesitancy has great impact not only on a worker’s individual health, but on the health of their patients, patient families, and on a population level. Because voluntary uptake of many vaccines, including the novel SARS coronavirus 2 (COVID-19) mRNA vaccine, has not been sufficient, vaccine mandates for health care workers have been suggested as one mechanism to ensure patient and health worker safety.1,2 In the current pandemic climate, the question arises: should clinicians, especially those who provide direct patient care, be mandated to get the COVID-19 vaccine? We argue that despite legal precedent for requiring vaccines, setting mandates for COVID-19 vaccines for health care professionals would be detrimental to population-level uptake, a high level of which is necessary to curb the pandemic.