President Joe Biden is taking a much more aggressive stance in the battle against COVID-19. Thursday, he announced a sweeping new plan to require more people to get vaccinated.

Using the government’s power to dictate safety and health measures in the workplace, the new rules mandate that all employers with 100 or more workers require them to be vaccinated. Workers at health care facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid payments will also have to be fully vaccinated.

Biden is also mandating that all federal employees of the executive branch must be vaccinated, along with contractors who do business with the federal government.

We have no doubt that opponents of vaccination mandates will see this as another loss of personal freedoms and liberties. People should have the right to control their personal health decisions.

But we can understand the frustration of those charged with protecting the public from dangerous health hazards when vast numbers of people simply refuse to accept their warnings and refute their information. These people create an opening for COVID-19 and the delta variant to keep spreading and infecting more people, perhaps evolving again into some new variant that may be harder to control.

In times of war, the government in the past has rationed food, gasoline, rubber and metal use to support the war effort. People may not have liked it but they understood.

We are in a war against COVID-19. President Biden is calling for sterner measures to combat the disease. We should respect him for that.