Mandates and moving people to do the right thing

A recent New York Times story, “Government vaccine requirements affect 12 million workers,” helps explain why. The news buried under that cartoonishly boring headline was that the paper’s analysis of local mandates, almost all of them imposed in states and cities that backed Biden, “did not seem to see any significant increase in the rate of vaccinations after the mandates, possibly because many of those areas already had relatively high vaccination rates.”

All told, just eight of the 31 places the Times analyzed had a vaccination rate that outpaced the national one by more than one percentage point after their mandate announcement, with New York City and State both among those eight.

But only one of the 31 places, Mississippi, increased its vaccination rate by more than two percent after imposing the mandate, compared to the same period there just before imposing it.

It turns out the places with the political will to impose vaccines were the ones where mandates weren’t much needed, or particularly effective.