Opinion
Get Vaccinated. Get Masked. It’s the Only Way Out
of This.
By The
Editorial Board
The
editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by
expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate
from the newsroom.
Aug. 5,
2021
The United
States is firmly entrenched in another coronavirus surge, and it seems that
many leaders around the country still have not learned the most important
lesson of the past 18 months: It takes quick, decisive action and clear
communication to get ahead of this virus. Temporary restrictions now are the
only way to avoid more stringent ones down the line. We know that masks work.
That vaccines work. That mandates work. To keep schools, restaurants and other
businesses and institutions open — and to bring the Delta variant to heel —
communities will need to use all of those tools together.
To be
clear, the Delta surge is poised to be less severe than previous surges in the
United States. Thanks to a largely successful vaccination campaign, roughly
half the population, including 80 percent of seniors, are fully inoculated
against the virus this time around. That means in most places, even accounting
for a very small portion of “breakthrough” infections among vaccinated people,
hospitalization rates and death tolls are not likely to be anywhere near as
high.
But when it
comes to the coronavirus, any surge is bad: The longer the virus spreads, the
greater its chances of evolving in ways that make it more transmissible, or
more deadly, or that render existing vaccines impotent. The surest way to avoid
that dreaded outcome is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as humanly
possible. And the fastest way to do that now — after months of concerted effort
to persuade the wary and reach the disenfranchised — is with vaccine mandates.
Some 93
million people who are eligible for the shots have yet to receive any. Surveys
suggest, and experts believe, that a good portion of those holdouts would get
vaccinated if they were made to, by their employers or schools, or if it were
required for certain activities, like traveling, attending cultural events or
dining out.
The power
of federal officials to issue a national vaccine mandate is questionable at
best. (It has never been tested, but most legal scholars say it would not
withstand court challenges.) But a 1905 Supreme Court decision made clear that
individual states can indeed require people to get vaccinated. State and local
officials have made regular use of that power in the century since — among
other things, requiring children to get vaccinated against a roster of other
diseases to attend public school.
They should
use that power now to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Officials in every state
should make coronavirus vaccines a requirement for participation in a whole
roster of social activities, from outdoor dining, to theatergoing, to gym use.
They should also require all public employees — including police officers,
firefighters and teachers — to be vaccinated against the coronavirus as a
condition of employment. Hospitals and long-term care facilities should require
all of their employees to be vaccinated as well. (Nursing homes have not yet
been required to report vaccination rates for their employees, but by some
estimates, those rates hover below 50 percent. The elderly continue to be among
those most vulnerable to the virus’s worst effects.)
Some
entities already have taken steps in this direction. Many universities require
proof of vaccination for students to enroll. In California and New York City,
hundreds of thousands of government workers must now show proof of vaccination
or submit to weekly testing. At least some private companies are also starting
to issue employee mandates.
But so far,
many of the unions that support these workers have resisted mandates, making
the work of state officials that much more difficult. In fact, as Joseph G.
Allen, the director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard University’s
T.H. Chan School of Public Health, recently noted in The Washington Post,
vaccination rates for many unionized workers are abysmal. In New York City, as
recently as late June, they hovered around 40 to 50 percent for police
officers, firefighters and corrections officers.
That’s not
nearly good enough. Average people don’t often have a choice about interacting
with these professionals. It’s fair and right for unions to protect their
members from unjust policies — workers should be given paid time off to get
vaccinated, and should not be penalized if they have cause for a legitimate
medical exemption from vaccination. But the virus is not going to wait for
those issues to be resolved — employers and workers need to come to agreements
now.
Unions are
not the only institutions whose support is needed. The Food and Drug
Administration can help clear the way for mandates by granting the mRNA
vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna full approval as quickly as possible,
(it is welcome news that the agency is reportedly aiming to accelerate its
timetable). Public health experts agree that the shots are both safe and highly
effective, but state leaders and private businesses have been reluctant to
mandate them without cover from federal regulators. (It would also help if the
F.D.A. had a permanent commissioner; it’s bewildering that President Biden has
yet to appoint one, in the middle of a pandemic and more than six months after
he took office.)
Until
vaccination rates increase, masks — and thus, mask mandates — will continue to
be necessary. Resistance to this idea is understandable. The mask culture war
has been exhausting; the people most likely to abide mandates are the same ones
who need those mandates the least because they are already vaccinated; and in
the long run it will be far more important to get people vaccinated than to
pester them about face coverings. But public policies should reflect what
science has made clear: Masks work. They are cheap and easy to use, and it
still makes sense to require them in public indoor spaces, in places where the
virus is spreading rapidly.
The Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention needs to do a much better job of explaining
this to the public. Officials there erred, not by dropping mask recommendations
earlier this year but by implying that the move was permanent. The agency is
now scrambling to correct course. Last week the C.D.C. advised vaccinated
people to wear masks in public indoor spaces in regions where the virus is
surging. But officials were slow to share or explain the data behind this
latest change in guidance.
There is no
good excuse for such communication blunders at this stage. Reversing public
health edicts is frustrating — and politically fraught — but it’s also part of
good public health practice. Leaders at every level should frame it that way.
They should also make clear that no success against this virus will ever be
secure until a vast majority of people are fully vaccinated against it.
In the pandemic’s
early days, the most prescient doctors and scientists described a future in
which mask mandates and other restrictions were repeatedly imposed and lifted,
as the virus waxed and waned. We are living that future now, and we are likely
to be stuck here for a while longer, even if the Delta surge suddenly fades, as
it did in Britain. The best way to protect ourselves, and to prevent future
surges, is to get vaccinated. But until many more people do just that, we’ll
need to keep our masks handy.
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