Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Don’t Force Employees to Get the Covid-19 Vaccine

Employer-mandated vaccination is a murky legal issue and a bad idea.

December 15, 2020 at 5:00 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

Vaccination should be an offer, not an order.
Photographer: Mark Lennihan/Getty Images

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Here’s a question we’re sure to see in the courts before long: What if your employer mandates a Covid-19 vaccination and you’d rather not take it?

President-elect Joe Biden might insist that he has no plans to compel the shots, but one imagines that lots of employers will come to the opposite conclusion, not only for the safety of their workforce and their customers but also because ... well, their employees might demand it. For instance, nearly two-thirds of tech workers surveyed say they won’t go back to the office unless their companies require all employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19.