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The New York Supreme Court declared the state COVID-19 vaccine mandate for medical staff “null and void,” striking it down. This is especially significant since this is not Florida but liberal New York. A big part of the reasoning behind the ruling was the now-acknowledged scientific fact that the various COVID vaccines do not stop transmission of the disease. This undercut the main basis for the mandate, that it was a major public health benefit.

In Catholic bioethics, the most important arguments used by defenders of COVID vaccine mandates, or the view that a “moral obligation” existed to take them, were generally variations on the common good rationale: people who did not fall into high-risk categories should nevertheless get vaccinated to protect other vulnerable people. It is quite true that Catholicism promotes solidarity and sacrifice for the poor and vulnerable, rather than a libertarian radical individualism, but in the end the circumstances simply did not support this argument. COVID vaccines are still very new. We do not yet know their long-term effects, but it is abundantly clear that the vaccines do not prevent people from catching COVID or transmitting the disease, and that the protective effects of the vaccines diminish rapidly in a matter of months. The vaccines are even less effective against the constantly emerging new variants of the virus. There is now no way to convincingly argue that taking these shots and multiple boosters is saving others from catching COVID.

Free and informed consent is a basic pillar of both secular and Catholic bioethics. Informed consent was a major ethical flashpoint with the new COVID vaccines because it was very unclear what the relative benefits and risks were. It is intuitively clear for most that it is a grave violation of ethics to experiment on people without their consent or to give them medical treatments or drugs without first explaining the potential risks and benefits. In certain situations, it may be impossible to obtain consent because someone is unconscious or too young to make decisions, but sometimes another person who understands the risks and benefits, acting in the other’s best interests, may give proxy consent. Given the unique situation surrounding the new COVID vaccines, neither type of robust informed consent was possible.

The COVID vaccines used a revolutionary new technology and were rushed into trials and production to make them quickly available. The phrase used to describe the process, “Operation Warp Speed,” is a reference to Star Trek science fiction, meaning travelling faster than the speed of light. Vaccines normally go though many years of development and a series of progressively larger clinical trials that take up to a decade before final approval. The long lapse of time helps to ensure that any devastating side effects that may take years to emerge can be detected before a product is released for mass production and use. There is simply no way to obtain long-term results for new vaccines used during a pandemic.

All of this meant that the scientific community and public officials should have honestly said that the famously repeated “safe and effective” phrase was a very provisional judgment. Enough time still has not elapsed to know the longer-term risks. What they could have said was that nothing definitive had been discovered so far, even though the voluntary reporting system for vaccine adverse reactions had very large numbers of submissions that needed to be investigated. Clinicians immediately started finding troubling negative side effects in a small percentage of cases. As a result, many people felt they were the objects of propaganda campaigns rather than receiving the objective information they needed to make informed decisions.

Given all the above, mandating that people take the COVID vaccines posed enormous ethical problems. At The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) we insisted that people needed to make this very important medical decision after a careful discernment, relying on the best and most objective information available to form their consciences. Coercing people to get vaccinated when all the necessary information and public health benefits were not available should have been seen as problematic. The situation did not meet the threshold of ethical acceptability. Some argued that this was an emergency, but we know as Catholics that it is a very grave matter to force a person to violate his or her conscience. Sure enough, the next problem was the way exemptions for those who could not in good conscience take these vaccines were at times routinely refused by government authorities, employers, or other institutions. Large numbers of people lost their livelihoods rather than submit to this coercion, a major sign that an injustice was being committed.

I purposely did not mention up to now the elephant in the room, the fact that all the approved new COVID vaccines available to some people, notably in the USA, had links to abortion-derived cell lines in either production or testing or both. The moral debate on this issue, which centers on the very difficult area of material cooperation with evil, only complicated discernment. The best and most authoritative Church reasoning resulted in pronouncements that in certain circumstances individuals could discern that they should take the only available vaccines under protest, but if their conscientious discernment led them to refuse to take them, this should also be respected.

All this militated strongly against vaccine mandates in the circumstances surrounding the COVID vaccines, and at a minimum, should have made the generous granting of exemptions an ethical requirement. The NCBC stuck faithfully to this very moderate and even-handed position that was nevertheless heavily criticized not only from the left but also from the right. In conscience we had to say what we believed was right and not what was politically popular. I am relieved that the courts, which did not block the mandates when they initially came out, are finally starting to rule that these sweeping mandates are “arbitrary and capricious,” lacking a solid legal, public health, or ethical basis.