Adults should not be forced to take vaccinations and children are not a high priority group for the COVID vaccine.
It looks like it won't matter too much. First off, until there is sufficient supply that we can vaccinate everyone who wants to be vaccinated, there's little reason to even consider forced vaccination. Second, assuming the vaccines are as effective as reported, unless we have truly atrocious levels of vaccine refusal, we should be able to reach herd immunity without forcing vaccination. Third, once we get COVID mostly under control in the first-world, it'll be far more important to get vaccine supply to third-world countries than to worry about the last few percent of idiots here. We have far more to fear from a new vaccine-resistant strain developing in the third-world and coming here than we do from it happening amidst the anti-vaxxer idiots amongst us.
There's just no reason for this for the reasons quoted above as well. Liberals love their authoritarian technocracy fantasies these days.
Yes and no.
It's correct that, for COVID, we should be able to reach what is considered to be the herd immunity threshold without mandatory vaccination. Assuming a reproduction value of ~3 for COVID, only approximately two-thirds of the population would need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. However, I think that it's easy to conflate "herd immunity" with total eradication of a disease within the population. When a population first reaches the herd immunity threshold, disease transmission does not suddenly become completely impossible, it simply begins to significantly wane. 67% of the population getting vaccinated does mean that we have technically attained herd immunity, but getting 95% of the population vaccinated would cause a faster and more drastic reduction in infection rates. Even within a population deemed to have herd immunity, individuals who cannot be vaccinated (and thus are not personally immune) still retain a risk of contracting the disease from others, because the disease is not gone. So, the absolute best scenario is always for the highest number of people possible to be vaccinated. The question is whether the benefits are worth sparking conflict over personal liberties, not whether the benefits exist.
And it's also important to note that herd immunity thresholds can be drastically higher for other diseases. For example, the highly contagious measles, with a reproduction value of ~15, requires 90-95% of a population to have immunity. So, even if mandatory vaccination isn't necessary for achieving herd immunity to COVID, that doesn't mean that mandatory vaccination never was or never will be necessary to effectively combat a disease.
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