Anthony Fauci’s wife – who is also head of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center – authored a paper defending the ethics of corporations “pressuring employees to get vaccinated” and “embarrass[ing] vaccine resistors.”
The study – “The Ethics of Encouraging Employees to Get the COVID‑19 Vaccination” – was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center and the National Human Genome Research Institute and counted Christine Grady, Fauci’s wife, amongst its authors.
Published in March 2022, the paper followed attempts by the White House as well as Democratic Party politicians across America to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for federal and state workers.
Grady’s paper focuses on the “ethics of encouragement strategies aimed at overcoming vaccine reluctance (which can be due to resistance, hesitance, misinformation, or inertia) to facilitate voluntary employee vaccination.”
Grady and her three co-authors outline how it is “ethically acceptable” to “subtly pressure employees to get vaccinated”:
While employment-based vaccine encouragement may raise privacy and autonomy concerns, and though some employers might hesitate to encourage employees to get vaccinated, our analysis suggests ethically acceptable ways to inform, encourage, strongly encourage, incentivize, and even subtly pressure employees to get vaccinated.
While discussing vaccine mandates, the paper posits they can “be ethically appropriate” if there is “clear articulation about the consequences of not complying with the policy.”
“In that circumstance, employees have a choice between getting vaccinated or accepting the consequences of a choice to remain unvaccinated,” it explains.
Grady outlines other tactics employers could use to boost COVID-19 vaccination rates within their company, such as sharing “targeted statistics (such as 75% of the company or unit have been vaccinated) to spur competition or even implicitly embarrass vaccine resistors.”
Hellbound and Down 