COVID-19 vaccines could become mandatory. Here?s how it might work.

To be cleared to enter, you’ll also need that document—proof that you’ve received a COVID-19 vaccination.This is the future as some experts see it: a world in which you’ll need to show you’ve been inoculated against the novel coronavirus to attend a sports game, get a manicure, go to work, or hop on a train.“We’re not going to get to the point where the vaccine police break down your door to vaccinate you,” says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University’s School of Medicine. Just as business owners can bar shoeless and shirtless clients from entering their restaurants, salons, arenas, and stores, they can legally keep people out for any number of reasons, “as long as they’re not running afoul of any antidiscrimination laws,” says Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, a professor of health and vaccine law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.When a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available, some experts think states will require targeted industries to enforce vaccine mandates for their employees, especially those we’ve come to know as “essential workers.”“Grocery store workers get exposed to a lot of people, but also have the chance to infect a lot of people because of the nature of their work and the fact that virtually everybody needs to buy food,” says Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. At work, employee badges could carry vaccination stickers, and a paper certificate from your doctor could serve as vaccine proof for public events.“Perhaps we'll get to a point where we need to sign proof of immunity to book an appointment,” Grossman says.More than 150 COVID-19 vaccines are currently in development. But if a COVID-19 vaccine is proven safe, “I think the majority of people will want it,” Caplan says.