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.
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