COVID‐19 Vaccine Mandates in Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study of Policies in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam

ABSTRACT The COVID‐19 pandemic precipitated a global emergency and governments employed various strategies to increase COVID‐19 vaccine coverage across the population, including vaccine mandates. No comparative study has evaluated the development, implementation, and structure of COVID‐19 mandatory vaccination policies in the Southeast Asia region. This paper uses a modified 5Ss systematic conceptual framework—which is composed of scope, sanctions, severity, selectivity, and salience—to analyse the operation of COVID‐19 mandatory vaccination policies in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Using document analysis, we describe and compare COVID‐19 Immunisation Programmes, implementation of vaccine mandates, exemptions, and enforcement in the four countries. It finds that their COVID‐19 Immunisation Programmes included mandates despite formal statements that the vaccinations were voluntary. Differences include the declarations of emergency, policy amendments and measures that underpin mandates; the severity of sanctions applied to the unvaccinated; how people opt out or avoid enforcement; and governance arrangements demonstrating varying levels of responsibility at different levels of government. Our comparative analysis leads us to propose a new continuum of available COVID‐19 vaccine sanctions based on their degree of severity, which can be used for future analysis. Future studies should determine the effectiveness of these policies to inform future pandemic strategies to achieve high vaccine coverage.