Should the Covid vaccine be mandatory?

There are many people, some of them of high status and influence (such as some politicians in the government of some countries) who are advocating for the Covid-19 vaccine to be made mandatory.

This would raise a lot of ethical, constitutional and human rights issues and questions. However, let's approach this question from a more practical perspective.

The thing is, we have an example of a good that mandatory vaccination can have. You see, smallpox was completely eradicated from existence via a worldwide aggressive vaccination campaign between the 1950's and 1970's. Smallpox killed millions of people every single year (it's estimated that during its last 100 years of existence it had killed about 500 million people). Thus its complete eradication from the face of Earth has saved millions of lives every single year. In some places people were essentially forcefully vaccinated against their will. While perhaps ethically and morally questionable, this action has undeniably saved millions of lives.

However, there are some crucial differences between smallpox and its vaccine, compared to Covid-19 and its vaccines.

For starters, smallpox was an endemic disease that had existed literally for thousands of years, and there was very little indication that it would ever cease to exist if nothing is done. It was never going to "burn itself out" on its own.

In contrast, Covid-19 is likely to be a temporary pandemic which ends up "burning itself out", just like so many other similar pandemics, most notably the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920. There is no indication that Covid-19 will become an endemic disease that will last for thousands of years unless aggressively eradicated, killing millions of people every year. Thus, there's significantly less incentive to forcefully vaccinate people who don't want to be vaccinated.

Secondly, while the smallpox vaccine was 100% effective in stopping the spread of the disease and just killing it outright because of a lack of viable hosts, the same isn't true for any of the current Covid-19 vaccines. All indications and data point to the fact that the current vaccines significantly reduce the chance of the infected becoming hospitalized and dying, but they don't prevent the spread of the disease itself. Unlike with the smallpox vaccine (and many other vaccines for other diseases), fully vaccinated people can still contract the disease and spread it around. Heck, they can even sometimes present visible and strong symptoms (the typical ones).

In fact, recent data shows that even when 100% (or close to 100%) of people of a country are fully vaccinated, it does not prevent the spread of the disease, and there may even be a surge of cases among the vaccinated. (Two examples of this include Gibraltar, where 100% of people are fully vaccinated, and Ireland where 90% of people are fully vaccinated. As of writing this the number of cases is raising in both places rather than going down.)

Thus, the Covid-19 vaccines, unlike many other vaccines (including the smallpox one), do not actually stop the disease from spreading (they might perhaps have a slowing down effect, but they don't stop it). Thus, once again, there's significantly less incentive for forcefully vaccinating people, because even if that were done it's not going to eradicate the disease. The only way the disease is going to disappear is for either a better vaccine to be developed or for it to just burn itself out, like the Spanish Flu.

So no, there are definitely not enough good rational reasons to forcefully vaccinate people even when they don't want to, bypassing all the ethical questions. There's a huge difference between Covid-19 and smallpox.