The “Path out of the Pandemic” will be paved with employer mandates, President Biden announced in September. But this week, a key part of the Biden plan hit a major speed bump in federal court. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed implementation of the administration’s vax-or-test mandate for private-sector companies with 100 or more employees, citing “grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the edict.

As my colleagues have explained, there’s ample reason to question the legal basis for the president’s latest power grab. I want to focus on a different question here: is the juice worth the squeeze? “Vaccination requirements should not be another issue that divides us,” Biden implored in a recent speech. But it’s been obvious from the start that his private-sector mandate would further fan the flames of our already rage-addled COVID politics. The question is whether it will accomplish much of anything else.

Color me skeptical: even if it survives its legal challenges, the scheme looks like something designed by a mad social scientist hellbent on further politicizing public health: loose enough to fail at achieving its aims, but just coercive enough to infuriate broad swathes of the public.

For years, the theory was that vaccine hesitancy was mainly a problem of information: give people the good news and they’ll queue up for the jab. But as Sabrina Tavernise explains in the New York Times, recent research suggests it’s more complicated. When epidemiologists joined with social psychologists to study the issue, “what they discovered was a clear set of psychological traits offering a new lens through which to understand skepticism.” Among those traits is one dubbed reactance, a deep-seated aversion to loss of threatened freedom. “According to this model,” the APA Dictionary explains, “when people feel coerced into a certain behavior, they will react against the coercion, often by demonstrating an increased preference for the behavior that is restrained, and may perform the behavior opposite to that desired.” It’s a healthy impulse in general—though emphatically not in this particular case.

Like it or not, though, mandates can backfire because people don’t want to be told what to do, particularly by someone they hate—and a good many in the target group hate the president more than they hate their boss. Add to that the fact that what the press has been calling a “vaccine mandate” is actually a “test or vax mandate.” Under the proposed emergency temporary standard, workers determined to avoid the needle will have an out that allows them to keep their jobs. For many high-reactance, Biden-hating vaccine skeptics, that’s going to look like the most attractive option.

True, opting out won’t be free: the ETS requires workers who forgo vaccination to mask up in the workplace for as long as the rule’s in effect. Moreover, the rule allows management to make vax-resistant employees pay for the cost of weekly testing. If rapid tests were cheap and ubiquitous, as they are in much of Europe, that wouldn’t be much of a disincentive. As it stands, though, tests currently run anywhere from $7 to $15 a week, if you can get them. The FDA has so thoroughly botched rapid-test development that this may be the rare case where bureaucratic incompetence at one end of the administrative state accidentally improves performance of a separate, ill-considered regulatory scheme.

If the mandate manages to survive legal challenge and if the costs of testing and masking prove high enough, then it will have some positive effects in terms of vaccine uptake. A Goldman Sachs analysis published in September estimates that all of the Biden mandates—including those for health care workers and federal contractors, where there’s no testing opt-out—might raise vaccine uptake by as much as 3.6 percent.

At this point, however, over 80 percent of American adults have had at least one COVID shot, the Delta wave has crested, and extraordinarily effective therapeutics, cutting the risk of serious illness by 89 percent, are coming online. Are the marginal public health benefits from the employer mandate enough to make it worth tolerating a massive new presidential power grab guaranteed to make our increasingly toxic politics still crazier?

The extent to which tribal signaling has infected the COVID debate is enough to make even a hardened cynic despair. Red state vaccine hesitancy needlessly and tragically exacerbated the pandemic’s toll through 2021; meanwhile, much of Blue America seems bent on embracing a permanent state of emergency: the Rest of Your Life to Slow the Spread. The technological miracle of the vaccines has finally reduced COVID to “just the flu,” making a return to normalcy possible. Yet as Richard Hanania sums it up, “we’re split between those who reject the solution and those who accept it but want to ruin life forever anyway.”

I’ve been thinking lately about a smartass comment I saw on Twitter, to the effect that we should have called one vaccine the Trump jab and the other one the Biden shot, and thereby made our moronic tribalism work for us for a change. Just picture the ad campaigns:

“Don’t be a soyboy: level up with #MAGAVax—it’s got what yer T‑cells crave!”

and

“Get the Bidenjab: builds your #Resistance—and it’s gluten-free!”

I can’t help thinking that would have been a smarter policy than what the allegedly serious people came up with.