To Save Unvaccinated Lives, Use Effective Antismoking Tactic

WASHINGTON - June 21, 2021 - PRLog -- Since it looks as if the U.S. will fall short of President Joe Biden's vaccination goal - 70% of American adults at least partly vaccinated by July 4th - it may be time for a new tactic which worked so successfully regarding smoking, at least if we really want to save thousands of lives and billions in unnecessary health care costs, suggests pubic interest law professor John Banzhaf.

When we first began to convince businesses that workers who refused to quit smoking endangered the health and very lives of other employees around them with their carcinogenic tobacco smoke, workers who had previously and stubbornly refused to quit smoking - despite all the health warnings and governmental pleas - soon acquiesced once their companies prohibited smoking on the job, remembers Banzhaf.

When many companies went a step further, and announced that only workers who had quit smoking could continue to work for them, even more very hurriedly quit, he says.

So now that there is a ruling by a federal court, a determination by the EEOC, and the acknowledgment by the CDC that employers can require their workers to be vaccinated or face termination, perhaps it's time for major corporations to publicly consider - if not actually announce - that their employees should finally get vaccinated if they want to guarantee their jobs and/or their return to the workplace, and for Biden to publicly suggest that they do so.

So, as with smoking, we can and should do more than simply warn and plead; major corporations which were quick to support many other causes even if lives were not directly at stake should consider imposing a vaccine mandate as thousands of companies (including hundreds of universities) have already done; and government leaders should support such policies, or at the very least make it clear that companies may legally adopt such measures.

Banzhaf notes that it is far easier to get one or two free COVID-19 vaccinations than it was for millions of smokers addicted to nicotine to quit if they wanted to keep their jobs. So if companies were willing to impose a no-smoking or even a no-smoker requirement when health warnings and persuasion wasn't sufficient, they should be willing to do the same here and now, and issue a vaccine mandate, for all of the same reasons, argues Banzhaf..

http://banzhaf.net/ jbanzhaf3ATgmail.com @profbanzhaf