WALL STREET JOURNAL
“It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target….Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here …
As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. COVID cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading …
The Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the right to refuse medical treatment could be overcome when society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic. At Friday’s oral argument, all the [Supreme Court] justices acknowledged that the federal mandates rest on this rationale.
But mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death).
As the World Health Organization puts it, ‘if mandatory vaccination is considered necessary to interrupt transmission chains and prevent harm to others, there should be sufficient evidence that the vaccine is efficacious in preventing serious infection and/or transmission.’6 For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence. The little data we have suggest the opposite.”
