DAVID BENATAR: Should vaccination be mandatory?
Practices ranging from forcible vaccination to nonpunitve measures have to be weighed in polemic over ethics
When Covid-19 first became pandemic, one of the immediate challenges was to develop a safe and effective vaccine to prevent if not infection then at least illness and especially severe illness. Such vaccines were developed in record time. The challenge then shifted to rolling out those vaccines to the world’s population. At a global level, meeting this challenge, far from breaking any records, has been a colossal failure. The vaccines have reached only a small proportion of the people who want and should have them.
Those countries that have had some success in vaccinating their populations now face a subsidiary rollout challenge — getting the vaccine into enough of those people who are resistant to or hesitant about being vaccinated (whether in general or against Covid-19 in particular)...
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