The goal of vaccination was to protect people from severe illness as much as possible — to limit hospitalization and death. The vaccines have done that. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in October found that COVID-19 vaccinations reduced hospitalizations among vulnerable citizens by more than 100,000 and deaths by 39,000. That’s a lot of lives saved.

Vaccination, then, has to be understood as an individual effort. It is a decision each person must make for his or her own benefit because it is a decision that only directly affects his or her health.

That’s not how public health officials have sold this vaccine. They have sold it as a public effort, a decision that affects the entire community. Indeed, officials bought so wholly into this collectivist attitude that they decided vaccination shouldn’t be a decision at all but should be mandatory. Hence the vaccine mandates becoming common in certain industries and liberal cities.

These mandates have always been socially unjustifiable, but now we know they are medically indefensible as well.