>and its never been controversial to call them vaccines.
They've never been mandated by law before (let alone a unilateral executive order). That it was done by executive fiat rather than legislation makes it especially troubling. If the president can unilaterally mandate a forced medical procedure, what can't they do? This isn't a question about vaccines or vaccine effectiveness, its a question about law, Constitutional rights and executive power.
You're making a different argument than the one I was replying to, which was precisely about vaccine effectiveness and semantics related to that.
But you're also wrong. The mmr vaccine is mandated if you want to attend k-12 public schools or federally funded public universities, and the ability to do that is uncontroversially in executive purview (for universities).
Also note that this EO has a testing option, so calling it a vaccine "mandate" is a stretch, unlike the EO that applies to federal contractors which is a mandate and is uncontroversially constitutional.
It’s fairly obvious that a mandate connected to taxpayer funded schools is a totally different thing than one governing all employers in the US. That’s not to defend the former so much as to point out that the set of arguments justifying it are on a whole different level of sanity than these executive fiats governing the entire labor market.
We aren't talking about public schools or federally funded universities. This isn't an issue of linking the use of public facilities or federal funds to conditions issued by the government - that's entirely different. We're talking about a unilateral executive action that mandates private citizens to undergo medical procedures to conduct their own private affairs. The fact is that there is no legal or Constitutional authority for the President to unilaterally issue laws or mandates. Whether vaccines are beneficial or not is entirely irrelevant. We either have a system of laws that we all live by, or we don't.
They've never been mandated by law before (let alone a unilateral executive order). That it was done by executive fiat rather than legislation makes it especially troubling. If the president can unilaterally mandate a forced medical procedure, what can't they do? This isn't a question about vaccines or vaccine effectiveness, its a question about law, Constitutional rights and executive power.