Important

But when it comes to the coronavirus, any surge is bad: The longer the virus spreads, the greater its chances of evolving in ways that make it more transmissible, or more deadly, or that render existing vaccines impotent. The surest way to avoid that dreaded outcome is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as humanly possible. And the fastest way to do that now — after months of concerted effort to persuade the wary and reach the disenfranchised — is with vaccine mandates.

Some 93 million people who are eligible for the shots have yet to receive any. Surveys suggest, and experts believe, that a good portion of those holdouts would get vaccinated if they were made to, by their employers or schools, or if it were required for certain activities, like traveling, attending cultural events or dining out.

The power of federal officials to issue a national vaccine mandate is questionable at best. (It has never been tested, but most legal scholars say it would not withstand court challenges.) But a 1905 Supreme Court decision made clear that individual states can indeed require people to get vaccinated. State and local officials have made regular use of that power in the century since — among other things, requiring children to get vaccinated against a roster of other diseases to attend public school.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/opinion/coronavirus-mask-vaccine-mandates.html