The Halakhic Ramifications of a Coronavirus Vaccine

Last week, a participant in a trial for an experimental inoculation against COVID-19 died, although likely for unrelated reasons. Still, the incident raises the very real issue that, before being fully tested and studied, new vaccines can pose unknown dangers, and people may have to weigh these dangers against the risks of the virus itself. Sharon Galper Grossman and Shamai Grossman examine this problem from the standpoint of Jewish law, beginning with the opinions of 18th- and 19th-century rabbis who addressed medicine’s first efforts at inoculation, which were far more dangerous than their present-day equivalents: