Biden on Vaccine Mandates, October 2020: You Couldn’t Enforce That

In mid-October 2020, in an ABC News town hall in Pennsylvania in the heat of the presidential campaign, Joe Biden was asked by George Stephanopoulos about imposing a vaccine mandate. He said there wasn’t authority to enforce that, and that the president would simply have to convince governors and mayors to do so:

Biden being Biden, he hemmed and hawed about whether he would trust the vaccine, then got confused halfway through his answer as to whether he was talking about mandating masks or mandating vaccines. But the best you can say is that Biden, a lawyer who had been in senior positions in the federal government for half a century, had not thought through the legal authority for such mandates five months into the pandemic. Two months later, at a press conference in Delaware after the election, he reiterated that view:

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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In mid-October 2020, in an ABC News town hall in Pennsylvania in the heat of the presidential campaign, Joe Biden was asked by George Stephanopoulos about imposing a vaccine mandate. He said there wasn’t authority to enforce that, and that the president would simply have to convince governors and mayors to do so:

Biden being Biden, he hemmed and hawed about whether he would trust the vaccine, then got confused halfway through his answer as to whether he was talking about mandating masks or mandating vaccines. But the best you can say is that Biden, a lawyer who had been in senior positions in the federal government for half a century, had not thought through the legal authority for such mandates five months into the pandemic. Two months later, at a press conference in Delaware after the election, he reiterated that view: