As scientists race to produce a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19, many experts are pondering how to administer such a vaccine — and whether it should be mandatory.
The United States is no stranger to mandatory vaccination programs and there’s plenty of evidence that they can work, but Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute of Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, fears attitudes towards public health measures have changed so rapidly in 2020 that such an approach for COVID-19 could backfire. “I’m really worried about that,” he says. “Lots of people don’t want to wear masks or accept that the virus is real.”
