COVID-19: Legal Regulation of Universal Vaccination

Abstract

The topic of this article is very relevant, first of all, due to the fact that at the moment it is objectively impossible to deny that the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences have acquired the status of a kind of main indicator of socio-economic processes and a mechanism for legitimizing the state system of regulation and management in covid and post-covid conditions. The subject of the article is the mechanism of legal regulation of mandatory vaccination against COVID-19. The purpose of the study is to identify the problems of legal regulation of the process of mandatory vaccination against COVID-19 through the prism of the human right to health protection and medical care in the system of universal values. This research is based on a combination of groups of classical general scientific methods (induction, deduction, analysis, synthesis) and a number of special methods of scientific cognition applied directly within the framework of legal science (formal legal, comparative legal and others). Within the framework of the presented article, the authors carried out a conceptual analysis of the human right to health protection and medical care in the context of domestic law, as well as administrative and legal aspects of mandatory vaccination against COVID-19 based on the analysis of the generalized experience of two macro-regions of the Russian Federation — Moscow and the Moscow region. According to the results of the study, the authors come to the following key conclusions: firstly, the chief state sanitary doctor of the subject of the Russian Federation has an objective right dictated by the norms of domestic legislation to issue an executive-executive-administrative act on the mandatory vaccination in a pandemic; secondly, the employer is obliged to suspend from work (not to hire) citizens who refused vaccination only if it is a question of works named in the List of works, the performance of which is associated with a high risk of infectious diseases. Such measures cannot be applied to employees performing other types of work; thirdly, failure by an organization/individual entrepreneur to comply with the resolution of the chief state sanitary doctor entails appropriate measures of legal responsibility provided for by the norms of the current legislation of the Russian Federation.
For citation: Kornienko A.S., Samokhvalov N.A. COVID-19: Legal Regulation of Universal Vaccination. Law. Journal of the Higher School of Economics, 2021,no. 5, pp. 148–166. (In Russ.). DOI: 10.17323/2072-8166.2021.5.148.166.