Original title is much more accurate "Courts block two Biden administration COVID vaccine mandates", the edited one here "Courts block Covid vaccine mandates for healthcare workers nationwide" implies something much larger in scope.
> Doughty said the CMS lacked the authority to issue a vaccine mandate that would require more than 2 million unvaccinated healthcare workers to get a coronavirus shot.
> "There is no question that mandating a vaccine to 10.3 million healthcare workers is something that should be done by Congress, not a government agency," wrote Doughty.
That's a good point. You can agree that its within the federal authority to mandate vaccines, but it really should be a decision made and explicitly endorsed by elected representatives rather than some agency (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) that I have never heard of until now and whose head is appointed by one person.
[EDIT]
Too often we look at the end results (e.g. will this increase vaccination rates) rather than the means of getting there. You see it on the left and right. If their guy is in power, they want to expand the scope and reach of their office. Everything is a crisis and someone can solve it if they're just given the right permissions.
And this eventually leads to dishonesty and loss of trust. Even news is reported through a utilitarian lens. Many journalists today think they're doing advocacy rather than reporting. They're not assigned topics but talking points. Someone could be the 'tech bad' guy and his stories are nominally about tech but about how big tech is subverting democracy, bad for the environment, you name it.
Could you imagine a news report about how the much touted vaccine efficacy of 95% didn't really pan out? It's true. Everyone was around 6 months ago and remembered the efficacy levels being thrown around. Now people are being gaslit to thinking they didn't hear what they heard and its about hospitalization. All because being honest could hurt the cause. And yes, vaccine efficacy was 95% and yes it does mean what you think it means [0]
Either way, ignorance of the existence of CMS is more indicative of a person's general level of ignorance about the US government. If I was just learning about the existence of CMS, I would at least learn a little more about the basics of the existing US government before making proclamations about how it should operate.
Not to mention, this is exactly how representative government works. It's not controversial that we do not have a direct vote on Secretary of Defense, a position that arguably has more human impact as the head of CMS.
Why are you moving the goal posts? No one said the population should directly vote on it. They said the representatives (who the people voted for) should be deciding through the legislature, not through a single appointed person.
> it is a Senate confirmed position - she was approved with a vote of 55-44 (with five R votes).
The elected representatives chose to delegate this power to the person they approved as the head of CMS. What principle would be involved in requiring Congress to execute its powers in a different manner (i.e. by not delegating), simply because one does not like the outcome in this case? Who would decide which powers Congress could delegate and which it had to exercise directly? Has someone already drafted the Amendment to the Constitution which would limit the powers of Congress in this way?
There's no reason in principle for Congress to directly make this decision about requirements placed on CMS contractors and not other aspects of vendor relations handled by CMS. (The narrow issue here is whether CMS can require its contractors to enforce vaccine mandates.)
That's true. My impression is that this is more or less a rubber stamp and the head is acting on behalf of the president. I can't imagine someone getting elected to this position that wouldn't take marching orders from her appointee. It's a lot of power to give one person.
In that case I don't understand your objection; the president is an elected official, so if this department head is acting on behalf of the president, the argument that this was done by an unelected official is kinda irrelevant.
You can agree that its within the federal authority to mandate vaccines, but it really should be a decision made and explicitly endorsed by elected representatives rather than some agency (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) that I have never heard of until now and whose head is appointed by one person.
If the CMS does it, it is a public health decision. Doing it in Congress makes it a political decision.
IMO, the better route is that the CMS issues the mandate, but that Congress ratifies it. Ie, they have to provide a clear reason why the public health decision should be overruled.
I disagree. It is a political decision to force 2 million Americans to get a vaccine that they don't want under threat of not being allowed to work in their profession. If you disagree with the decision at least you can vote the bastards out.
You're acting like its a trivial procedural matter. These people obviously feel very strongly about it since they're under immense pressure everywhere to get it and they still refuse. Or they may have other reservations, but to dismiss that and just have some nameless faceless un-elected organization intrude in their lives in such a meaningful way is really gross
congress could have acted here, they could still act. they didn't. Not doing something is a choice when it occurs in reaction to someone else doing something.
Whether it is a 'trivial' procedural matter simply isn't affected by people's strongly held beliefs
Strongly held beliefs don't exempt you from seat belt laws, from tax rules, or from any other law unless congress doing the thing congress is designed to do allows for it. It shouldn't.
CMS isn't unelected...it is an arm of the executive branch headed by the, elected, president and run by someone confirmed by the elected senate. It is given the authority to make rules in specific areas by the elected congress.
Your entire thread or argument is predicated on a false assumption...
This is absolute horseshit. Government regulation of public health during a pandemic is absolutely its role.
We have required a great number of vaccines for the last 100 years. The coronavirus vaccines are some of the most-tested out there. Anti-vaxxing was a fringe position that nobody took seriously before Covid.
The only reason this virus is remotely political is because we had a demagogue in the president’s office who likes to force people into contrarian positions because it strokes his ego. So if people want to stay home from work because their politics don’t allow them to do the job, that’s not my problem.
Hey, would you please not post flamewar comments like this to HN—regardless of how right you are or feel you are? It's not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and your post here is a noticeable step down in discussion quality. Several steps actually.
We've had to ask you about this more than once before. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If fewer people dying/getting sick is a political goal, then more people dying/getting sick so that the current administration gets voted out can also be a political goal.
I'm not a fan of the situation, but you're acting like it's forced sterilization. It's just a vaccine with a very safe profile. For God's sake, all healthcare workers including the cleaning staff have to get flu shots and show their immunizations every year, or they can't work. Even as a college student I had to get a meningitis shot.
>For God's sake, all healthcare workers including the cleaning staff have to get flu shots and show their immunizations every year, or they can't work. Even as a college student I had to get a meningitis shot.
The difference is that those examples aren't mandated by the federal government (as far as I know). I think most people are fine with companies and universities requiring people to be vaccinated.
It's a 'new' tech with a lot of shady political hand waving that impacts your body. Like redefining vaccine, a rushed testing process and... oh yea the feds waived all legal liabilities for the private entities that developed it.
I think given the context that if your under 65 you are more likely to have medical complications driving to the grocery store its a pretty understandable perspective.
Also the mandate has no exception for natural immunityI. It is I had it and no symptoms of it except I couldn't taste anything, given above, I why would I get a vaccine.
I think it’s actually reasonable for an agency (CMS) to decide eligibility criteria for receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid dollars. This was authority granted to the agency by Congress. Requiring employees to be vaccinated as a condition to accepting Medicare seems pretty reasonable to me. Just as I would hope hospitals need to meet basic care standards to be eligible as well.
Congress often delegates their power to other agencies. It’s an important regulatory function that allows agencies to adapt to a changing world even in a gridlocked legislature.
> Requiring employees to be vaccinated as a condition to accepting Medicare seems pretty reasonable to me.
That's just a backdoor for giving more power to the federal branch. Its like 'interstate commerce' where anything that has interstate implications (pretty much everything) can be influenced by the federal government. What if an anti-abortion president elected someone to this board and told them that no health care provider that accepts medicare or medicaid can offer abortions?
I don't see mandating people to get a vaccine that they don't want as non-political bureaucratic action, especially considering its coming from the president's office. It's mandating a medical treatment. Take a step back and ask under what authority and supervision should we require a government to be mandating a medical treatment.
It's interesting you bring up both commerce clause and abortion as I'm currently taking a constitutional law class covering both issues. The commerce clause did wildly expand through the 20th century, but I just want to point out that US v Lopez substantially cut back Congress' Commerce power. It laid out clear restrictions to what and when Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. Further cases like NFIB v Sebelius (Obamacare) also cut down on commerce power.
The difference I see with abortion is that the SCOTUS held in Roe v Wade that women have an affirmative right to an abortion under substantive due process of the 14th amendment. If the government coerced healthcare providers to stop providing abortions, this would be a direct infringement on a right protected by the constitution. Conversely, there is no constitutional right to /not/ get a vaccine. Of course, the demographics of the court has changed, so it's very possible the SC will rule that not getting vaccinated is also a constitutional right conferred by substantive due process.
Thanks for the insight. I wasn't aware of US v Lopez. The most egregious use I found of the commerce clause was Wickard v Filburn. It was a depression era ruling that said the federal government had the right to prevent a farmer on growing food on his own land to feed his livestock in opposition to a law meant to 'stabilize wheat prices' by having farmers not grow food. Ever since then I was no a fan of commerce clause. Would something like this be possible today or did US v Lopez make this impossible?
> Conversely, there is no constitutional right to /not/ get a vaccine
Doesn't it need to be framed as the government having the right to apply a medical treatment to me against my will?
I have a constitutional right to bare arms but presumably the federal government can decry that I do not have the right in certain places. Or is that not an affirmative right.
[EDIT] It appears that is what US v Lopez is about (federal restriction of guns near schools)
> Doesn't it need to be framed as the government having the right to apply a medical treatment to me against my will?
This will be tested in litigation in cases like OP, but remember, these vaccine mandates are NOT the government forcing you to accept medical treatment. These mandates have been coercing private employers to require vaccination as a condition of employment. This indirection muddies the water and I can't speculate as to what the courts will ultimately decide on.
> Of course, the demographics of the court has changed.
Thats a problem when the demographics of a ruling body affect rights protected by the Constitution.
Wisely the Constitution also provides remedy for when that gets too out of hand: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I think one area the Constitution missed the boat is that when a politician or someone in delegated power makes a law or rule that infringes on someone’s freedom that person should be charged and punished for treason. I would think that you would see so many fewer laws a much stronger and law abiding Country.
Are there any laws that don't infringe on someone's freedoms in some manner? Speeding, theft, discrimination, environmental protections, that's all infringing on one party's freedoms for the protection of themselves or others. That's basically what a law does, it restricts some form of freedom in an effort to provide some form of safety or equity.
There are plenty of laws that affect someone’s freedom as you pointed out. I’m talking about Constitutional rights such as free speech or the right to bear arms.
If you don’t agree with those provisions there is a method to change them and too often short cuts are made that are only corrected after the fact in the courts. Take for instance Biden's vaccine mandate. He knew that was unlawful yet he knowingly did it anyhow. There should be a personal consequence to that beyond not being re-elected.
Ah, ok, those aren't freedoms, those are right. You started talking about rights and then started saying freedom, so I was confused. Especially when you talked about having fewer laws because of it.
And I don't believe if the precedent is set regarding freedom from vaccinations being a fundamental right. Won't that have to be decided by the higher level courts? I don't think we're at that stage of treason yet, are we? After all, there will be appeals, and I don't know if a district judge should have the power to charge and punish POTUS.
The vaccine is mandated as a condition for employment. Is it different from universities requiring vaccines for their students (Indiana University already won a legal challenge -- https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/08/barrett-leaves-indiana-un...) or military personnel having to get a battery of shots when they enlist? All those requirements should survive or fall together.
Public schools in many (most? all?) municipalities require kids be vaccinated against several things before being allowed to attend school. This has been the case since well before I was born. This is a government setting the requirement. Now, perhaps it is not legal for the federal government to set this sort of requirement. But maybe it is.
Commerce clause is a valid reason for federal government to make rules. Imagine each state having their own EPA with their own rules and regulations. Or each state had their own FAA. Or OSHA. It would kill interstate commerce because it would be too costly for businesses to operate at the national level.
Regarding the EPA, I can imagine it not existing. In fact, EPA did not exist when some here were children.
https://www.epa.gov/history
The pollution solution is defending property rights. In the short term, the USA pollution solution is to offshore manufacturing pollution to other countries.
"some agency"? It's an agency put in place and managed (budget, appointments, etc.) BY ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES. Did you want a direct vote on vaccine mandates? Sometimes it seems people fail to understand what a representative government is.
The studies that got the vaccines approved in the first place had to show that they were effecitive for all adults. I'm sure that with some digging it should be possible to find the data split by age group.
More recently, we've also gotten data for many vaccines showing that they're also effective for children and adolescents.
Lastly, another important group is the elderly. Some studies suggest that they respond more poorly to the vaccine and that the protection may last a shorter time. In response, many countries have prioritized the elderly for receiving booster shots (3rd dose).
>More recently, we've also gotten data for many vaccines showing that they're also effective for children and adolescents.
This is my principal area of concern. If I recall correctly, the studies that were submitted to FDA for approval for young children did not show improvement in hospitalizations or deaths, in fact there was not a single death in any of the groups, rather they relied on showing the jabs successfully produced antibodies (a much lower standard).
> did not show improvement in hospitalizations or deaths
Well, it's not surprising that there would be fewer deaths in children. We'd need a much larger study and I expect that this data will become available now that the vaccines are started to be more widely distributed.
> rather they relied on showing the jabs successfully produced antibodies (a much lower standard)
IIRC the study also found that the vaccine was effective at preventing infections.
> Too often we look at the end results (e.g. will this increase vaccination rates) rather than the means of getting there.
Strongly agree. Tangentially, I felt this way about net neutrality. It should have been law passed by Congress. Instead, everyone cheered when an unelected executive board passed a net neutrality bill that the public wasn't allowed to read.
And then, everyone had the audacity to be surprised when the FTC undid net neutrality as fast as it did it. There is a reason we have a legislature and not just an executive branch that can do anything it wants.
Because the chance of a net neutrality bill making it through the Senate is roughly equivalent to guessing Satoshi's wallet. We can barely pass debt ceiling increases to avoid national default.
The net neutrality PR did work though, the FCC was under a lot of pressure . ATT didn't pay all of those marketing firms to fraudulently post thousands of anti-net-neutrality comments for nothing.
And what if it is fundamentally unfixable? Do we just allow everything to grind to a halt and pretend that everything is working as designed as the country crumbles beneath us? I guess that's easier to do when it's the working class and not most HN-type folks who would get hit the hardest by that plan.
Congress has been delegating rule-making authority to the executive branch since before all of us were born. You may not like that, or you may think some amount of delegation is appropriate, but we've passed that point. But this is the reality here, and the functioning of our federal government pretty much has this baked in at this point, for better or worse.
If it's fundamentally unfixable, then the Constitution fundamentally doesn't work, or at least doesn't work with the society we have now. I think the first step is to figure out why. Did this ever work, or were we just kidding ourselves for two centuries? If it worked then but not now, what changed?
Then, once the cause is understood, the next step would be to figure out an appropriate system that would work, or at least work better, and amend the Constitution to reflect that new system.
The alternative is to just let things continue as they are going, and I don't like that choice. It results in the president becoming more of a ruler and less of an executive. I expect less freedom down that road (and eventually none), and I don't like it.
My take on the questions I posed is this: Yes, it did work, at least adequately, and now it doesn't. What changed? I suspect that it was Roe v Wade. Since then, the right has been trying to get control of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, and the left has been trying to block them. So both are fighting over control of the nomination process, which means the presidency and the Senate. I suspect that that's the cause of the trench warfare in Congress.
If I'm right, then it is in fact ultimately unfixable. Neither side is going to compromise, ever. You can't even fix it by amending the Constitution, because then there's going to be a battle about undoing the amendment.
> You can agree that its within the federal authority to mandate vaccines, but it really should be a decision made and explicitly endorsed by elected representatives rather than some agency
I'm from a country (UK) where parliament has absolute power, but also where the populace largely trusts the civil service. Health decisions, prosecution decisions, and so on are explicitly devolved from the government so that they don't become politicized. To me, that seems better, rather than asking politicians to intercede in what should essentially be decisions for experts to make.
> Except in the US, the civil service is politicized and its employees are 95% in favor of one party, as shown by their political donations history.
That's not at all generally true historically, even if you drop the made up specific number and say something like “vast majority", of US civil servants; it is true of some states, localities, or agencies, and reversed for others.
2020 looks like that, but the 2020-2021 election and transition cycle were rather outside of historical norms. [0]
There is some historical imbalance, but then, that
people who adhere to the party that consistently demonizes government, government work aside from military and law enforcement, and government workers, aside from military and law enforcement don't tend to choose to work for government as much as people who don't adhere to that party is...somewhat unsurprising.
The historical chart on my first link shows that 2020 is wildly nonrepresentative.
Unless you think that Trump vs. the present Democratic party is somehow a new stable political alignment.
> I'd say the Federal civil service starts at Health and Human Services and below.
It does not. Department of State and USPS are largely federal civil service, whereas Los Angeles County and the City of New York are entirely not, for instance.
Well, look at 2018 compared to 2020 - they are similar.
State and the USPS are a little different - State looks outwards, unlike the rest of the agencies, and the USPS is quasi civil service and a bit of a political football. Not only that, but it has a strong local presence across the country.
The rest of the agencies are, unfortunately, politicized and biased.
Edit: Not all the charts in your link show cumulative data.
But, look at the chart for "Party Split, 1990-2022" in the election years - that's when the civil service donates heavily to get "their party" into power:
2012: Dem 69%
2016: Dem 77%
2020: Dem 76%
That chart includes both "Public Officials" and "Civil Servants". The former group is far more balanced, since the Republican/Democratic split is pretty even. If there was a similar chart for just the Civil Servants, it would be a lot more biased.
Except that the role of the CMS, as established by congress, is to set the guidelines of care and standards of participation for providers who opt to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients.
They set rules for everything from how many hospitals can be owned by a single entity, to what sorts of qualifications are required for hospital administrators, to what types of medical orders are allowed to be given to patients. Their explicit charter is to ensure Medicare and medicaid patients are cared for and their health is looked after. From that lens, requiring a vaccination that reduces the likelihood that one of those patients is infected with a potentially deadly disease (particularly deadly for those on Medicare, given the demo), is eminently reasonable.
And the administrator is confirmed by congress. If this regulation was about almost anything else, this would be a nothingburger
> to what types of medical orders are allowed to be given to patients
Suppose an anti-abortion president gets elected and he elects someone as head and tells them that health care providers that accept medicare or medicaid cannot provide abortions. Not making it illegal per-se, but just for the providers that accept medicare or medicaid for any of their services.
> Suppose an anti-abortion president gets elected and he elects someone as head and tells them that health care providers that accept medicare or medicaid cannot provide abortions
Not comparable. Based on current law, abortion is a Constitutionally-protected right. Based on precedent from the Spanish-flu era, the government has broad public health powers.
All that said, as someone who isn’t a fan of how much power Congress has ceded to the executive through administrative powers (which delegate legislative powers to the executive through rulemaking), I wouldn’t mind seeing those curtailed.
You should probably read the Jacobson decision more carefully [1], since you believe that it grants the government the right to mandate vaccines.
The decision is much more narrow that you've been led to believe.
It specifically addresses state police powers, not federal powers.
It also doesn't mandate vaccination, it allows a small fine to be paid instead.
Also, according to a well known attorney I consulted (who has argued several cases before the Supreme Court) the Jacobson decision has been overturned countless times and is considered an awful ruling, the Healthcare equivalent of Dred Scott.
> since you believe that it grants the government the right to mandate vaccines
Specifically avoided saying that. Stated simply, my point is there is positive precedent to the precursors to vaccine mandates, and reasonable ambiguity to the question per se. There is clear negative precedent for abortion. As such, comparing them is misleading. (Better analogy may be found in gun rights.)
The problem I see with this kind of argument is that whether a health care provider provides abortion services has very little (nothing) to do with the care given to a medicaid or medicare patients. Where-as them being vaccinated for COVID does have a very clear impact on medicaid/medicare patients, especially since medicare patients are more likely to be in a high risk group (IE: old).
It seems to me like you just don't think medicare or medicaid should be a thing to begin with. I think it's basic sense that if we're paying for medicare and medicaid we should require the healthcare providers receiving our tax dollars to meet some standard level of care, or else we're just wasting our money. We can argue over what that level of care should be, but I don't think it's all that debatable that requiring things like vaccines could fall into that level of care if not having them is particularly risky for patients.
> The problem I see with this kind of argument is that whether a health care provider provides abortion services has very little (nothing) to do with the care given to a medicaid or medicare patients.
There's no mechanism to enforce this reasoning. It's whether the agency has the power to do it or not. For instance it could be argued that natural immunity is far superior to vaccines, so excluding healthcare workers with natural immunity from working is not about protecting patients.
> It seems to me like you just don't think medicare or medicaid should be a thing to begin with.
The mechanism would be the judicial system, and in the case of restricting abortion services, the regulation would probably be subject to strict scrutiny.
> There's no mechanism to enforce this reasoning. It's whether the agency has the power to do it or not. For instance it could be argued that natural immunity is far superior to vaccines, so excluding healthcare workers with natural immunity from working is not about protecting patients.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, Congress gave the agency the power to set guidelines for requirements for caring for medicaid/medicare patients, that's what they do. If a guideline would not actually impact medicaid/medicare patients, then they can't do it and it would rightfully get struck down in court when it is challenged for not falling within their powers. That's quite literally the same mechanism currently being used to challenge their power to require vaccines.
Your point about natural immunity seems reasonable, it doesn't mean requiring vaccines for those without natural immunity wouldn't still make sense though so I don't think it really fits your point. Claiming that the particular way they went about this requirement is bad is different from saying they can't require a vaccine at all. I think your point makes some sense, but it could still be paired with a vaccine requirement making it effectively the same thing.
> ???
I thought what I said was pretty self explanatory. If Medicare and Medicaid are going to be worth it then we have to have some standard level of care that we're paying for - we shouldn't be paying tons of money just for medicare/medicaid patients to receive bad care. Why should my tax dollars to go a healthcare provider who doesn't want to get the vaccine when that money can go to one who will? The medicare/medicaid patients that we're paying for will get better treatment from those healthcare providers who require vaccination, and if better care is not the goal than what is?
>> It seems to me like you just don't think medicare or medicaid should be a thing to begin with.
Please don't ascribe beliefs or intentions to me that I didn't explicitly state.
> Why should my tax dollars to go a healthcare provider who doesn't want to get the vaccine when that money can go to one who will?
Medicare and Medicaid should be fee for treatment. Why shouldn't I be allowed to choose what provider I want to visit for the same treatment? They can have different covid policies, much like schools do. I don't think it should be a federal issue.
> The medicare/medicaid patients that we're paying for will get better treatment from those healthcare providers who require vaccination, and if better care is not the goal than what is?
You're mistaking treatment for safety protocols. A health care provider can have a certain doctor to nurse ratio or a million other things and they may not all be "optimal" as defined by the powers that be. We should allow people to choose what health care provider is right for them based on their constraints and not restrict options.
> We should allow people to choose what health care provider is right for them based on their constraints and not restrict options.
Disagree. If I'm footing the bill for that care (as a taxpayer) I expect to have a say in what constitutes minimum quality of care.
And allowing unvaccinated healthcare workers to treat patients is reckless, and falls well below that minimum quality bar.
(I would also accept healthcare workers with natural immunity, assuming we can establish some sort of testable minimum antibody level that confers a similar level of protection as a vaccine.)
> Why shouldn't I be allowed to choose what provider I want to visit for the same treatment? They can have different covid policies, much like schools do. I don't think it should be a federal issue.
You can, by paying for it yourself :P
> You're mistaking treatment for safety protocols. A health care provider can have a certain doctor to nurse ratio or a million other things and they may not all be "optimal" as defined by the powers that be. We should allow people to choose what health care provider is right for them based on their constraints and not restrict options.
I see what you're saying but I think it's an odd distinction, treatment outcomes and safety protocols are clearly linked, why should tax dollars go to treatment provided with substandard safety protocols when the same can be spent for better treatment elsewhere? Functionally it would just end up costing us and the program more over time and lead to worse outcomes. The other issue here is that most patients aren't even going to know enough about the various things you listed to make an informed opinion about them.
"it could be argued" is not a substitute for the judgement of the regulatory body. The regulatory body hears arguments and makes a determination, I'm pretty sure that's the mechanism. (And it sounds like the court has decided to overrule it on shaky grounds.)
> it could be argued that natural immunity is far superior to vaccines
It could be argued that we should wait for benevolent space aliens to come and cure it. Just because it could be argued doesn't mean it's a good argument.
Every single study done on the topic shows that natural immunity (not innate immunity) is vastly superior and more durable and more robust than vaccine immunity. Here's a study from the prestigious publication Cell: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...
The problem here is not preferring vaccines to natural immunity for previously uninfected people -- it is mandating vaccinations for people already having natural immunity. Once that comes into play you can be sure health outcomes are not the intention of the policy.
Banning health care providers from abortion would be unconstitutional. It would be the same as a president banning health care providers from serving muslims. Women have a constitutional right to get an abortion. People don't have a constitutional right to not vaccinate. Government can and has jailed and/or fined people for not getting a vaccine. These SCOTUS approved mandates helped rid America of smallpox.
The supreme court ruled that the 14th amendment[0], has somewhere hidden within it a right to privacy. This right to privacy appearently applies exclusively to abortion, as warrentless wiretapping of every US citizen has been determined not to be a constitutional violation.
I find it funny that they can find a right to privacy in the 14th, but give the thumbs up to civil asset forfeiture that directly contradicts the text and is a obvious violation. They seem to make things up as they go along depending on what is politically expedient.
The right to privacy is in the 4th amendment, the 14th amendment is used to "incorporate" constitutional rights to the states. Prior to the 14th amendment the rights in the constitution only prevent abridgement of rights by the federal government but states were free to take them away.
> Women have a constitutional right to get an abortion.
Do they? Where is that written?
EDIT: the vague "life, liberty, or property" clause as interpreted by Roe vs Wade. This is such a blank-cheque it may as well not be in the constitution as in hands all power to the interpretation of the courts.
" the vague "life, liberty, or property" clause as interpreted by Roe vs Wade. This is such a blank-cheque it may as well not be in the constitution as in hands all power to the interpretation of the courts."
If you read federalist papers or any of the writings of founders on the constitution. The constitution is a living document that is decided by the courts. It is really hard to have a fruitful debate without people having even basic knowledge on this subject.
I didn't say the courts couldn't interpret the constitution, but "living document" doesn't need to imply vague - RvW carved out a limited clarification without supplying a general rule of what is and isn't covered. The courts shouldn't have the power to totally skewer the constitution, ad-hoc.
> having even basic knowledge on this subject
That's your opinion. People debate in echo chambers all the time, if that's what you'd prefer.
> Banning health care providers from abortion would be unconstitutional.
Forcing care workers to take a medicine against their will is constitutional you say?
All medical procedures should be voluntary, or we go back to the times of lobotomy and forced sterilizations of minorities (and that's not as many decades back as you may think).
> Government can and has jailed and/or fined people for not getting a vaccine.
This means being unvaxed is a something only the rich can afford. Pay fines, and have a good lawyer.
Greater good of society out weighs people's individual rights. These are basic constitutional tenets. Why you can't yell fire in a crowded theater even though you have the right to free speech. Why the SCOTUS has ruled vaccine mandates are constitutional.
Society is a cultural framework and does not in any way supercede individual rights. There is no greater good. The SCOTUS has ruled that states have the authority to mandate vaccination not the federal government. The federal government is extremely limitited in its authority by the Constitution.
Schenk was overturned because it was a bad decision. In general, “fire in a crowded theater” is my heuristic for “this person doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.
Greater good is what it makes it possible to have individual rights. Imagine if you had an absolute right to free speech. You could write or speak anything without legal recourse. Trademark law and copyright law wouldn’t work. Fraud wouldn’t be prosecutable.
Apply that to other rights like the right to bear arms. If government couldn’t set standards and people could procure any weapon, how does society function? How does air travel even exist with people owning anti aircraft missiles.
That’s why our founders made our constitution a living document with courts interpreting the constitution and balancing individual rights with our collective rights.
I see the "living document" argument made a lot, and I don't think it means what some people think it means.
The founders were purposefully vague in several areas of the constitution because they absolutely did want circumstances to determine interpretation, however they were not vague at all about delegated and reserved powers. These things are not "living" in a sense of judicial review.
By "living" document, it was intended that the constitution could be modified by an amendment process. There was never a provision for judicial review.
In fact, then entire concept of judicial review arose from Marbury vs Madison [1] where the court claimed this power.
The purpose of the U.S. Constitution, and one of the things that makes it unique in history, is to limit the powers of the government. The founders believed that individual rights were innate (granted by God), not granted by government and certainly not granted by the federal government.
All powers other than those specifically Delegated to the federal government are reserved for the States - the 10th Amendment makes this clear.
It is not the role of the federal government to decide on "greater good" mandates, those powers are very specifically reserved for the states, who are constrained on what they may do by the Constitution and its amendments.
We, as a country, have allowed the federal government to overstep this in many areas. The DEA, for example, only exists because of a very bad interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, which arose from a bad Supreme Court decision (Wikard vs Filburn)[2] about whether or not you were allowed to grow your own wheat.
Yes, and coercion is a tool that governments use all the time in order to keep selfish people from trampling over the safety and well-being off their neighbors. Vaccination perfectly fits that bill.
The SARS-CoV2 vaccine does not provide any meaningful reduction in the spread of the virus. At best it provides a reduction in severity of symptoms for an individual infection. So, your argument that forced injection is justified is null based on vaccine effect alone. Current attempts at coercing employees to vaccinate also do not take into account naturally acquired immunity that is stronger than any vaccine provides.
I was just establishing that you don't have a philosophical problem with an Authority using coercion to achieve a goal.
Vaccines are safe and effective so I wont get into what conspiracy theories you believe about the COVID-19 vaccine. Most importantly, vaccines have been mandated by the government in different settings for years. I'm sure if you went to college at a public school, you had to certain vaccines. I know I did.
In general I will rebel against any authority that claims to know what is better for me than I do. Nobody is my master. That is what our Constitution protects. My individual right to do whatever the hell I want to as long as it doesn't inhibit other people from doing the same. That doesn't mean I would not comply just for the sake of it. If something is requested of me I will weigh the risks and benefits for myself and my family and make a decision that is best for me.
Despite what the media and elected/appointed officials are telling you the SARS-CoV2 vaccine is not 100% safe[1] or effective[2]. The authority to mandate vaccines resides with states not the federal government. The SCOTUS has upheld this authority in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. The federal government has absolutely zero authority to mandate vaccination in any capacity.
Yes, I did get vaccinations that were mandated by my state to attend public school. All of them were for diseases that are much more destructive and deadly than SARS-CoV2. In my case the vaccines required by my state were diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella.
> Despite what the media and elected/appointed officials are telling you the SARS-CoV2 vaccine is not 100% safe[1] or effective[2].
Who the fuck's been saying either of those things? None of the mainstream sources I've seen, certainly. Usually, for the efficacy angle, they're emphasizing that it's not 100% effective, and that's part of why it's important that more people get vaccinated and that vaccinated people continue to take precautions.
My thought is that anti-science folks are telling each other that the media and scientists are saying that mainly because the evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective is overwhelming. They need to move the goal post to "100%".
> Forcing care workers to take a medicine against their will is constitutional you say?
They are not forced to take the medicine. They are given an choice to take the vaccine or find another job. If they refused to take the vaccine, that is their choice, period. They cannot claimed they are being forced because they are given an choice in the first place. They are given a free will with their decision. Thousands of Thousands people screeching for being forced when they are given a choice. Society don’t have to conform to those people who want to endanger their people and their livelihood.
Choices have consequences. I have the choice to stop wearing clothes to my job and the consequence of that choice is that my job would fire me.
The ability of the government to establish vaccination requirements is long established. It's only becoming a hot topic now because anti-science folks have been programmed to fear a safe and effective vaccine.
The court really has nothing to do with whether or not something is well-established. The judge who blocked the mandate is an ideological, inexperience trump appointee.
I'm talking about 'well-established' in that it's been happening for 200+ years. The conservative right-wing theocratic extremists that trump appointed will destroy our judicial norms for the next 50 years but that doesn't make them right.
> I have the choice to stop wearing clothes to my job
The difference is you flipped the switch and decided to turn up to work without clothes. You decided to radically change your behavior and actions in the workplace. This will obviously have consequences due to your unsightly naked body offending co-workers.
When someone doesn't flip any switch, but continues to work exactly as they did before, they have not done anything you can label a "choice with harsh consequences".
Unvaccinated people are not suddenly shedding and dangerous, in the way a naked person is shedding pubic hairs everywhere.
>Unvaccinated people are not suddenly shedding and dangerous, in the way a naked person is shedding pubic hairs everywhere.
Unvaccinated people are inherently dangerous. The change is that we now have the ability for them to become vaccinated people who aren't nearly as dangerous to their clients.
In June 2020, we had no choice but to have unvaccinated health care workers. Today, we do.
They are not dangerous. A person who has access to sharp knives but is currently not holding a knife, is no more dangerous than someone who does not have access to knives.
But even that analogy doesn't fit, since vaccinated people can certainly still get sick and transmit the virus.
Besides, I am not restricting my position in this debate to health care workers. I am talking about anyone with a job, who is now required to get vaccinated. That's what happened where I live (Australia). Everyone in my state from barristers, to builders, office workers, truck drivers... literally every professional who isn't working from home, is required to get the vaccine or lose their job.
Many are pissed off with the expanding scope of mandates.
I can understand the requirement for health workers to be vaccinated. But even then, they should have the option to be tested regularly instead.
This is what happens... incremental laws expand and eliminate choice. Suddenly you live in a world where you must get jabbed every 6 months, and repeatedly prove your vaccine status to everyone every day. Tagged, tracked and validated for walking around doing normal things is not a world we should be encouraging, even in pandemic times. If we must disagree on that point, then fine, we disagree.
I think there's really a collision between your conspiracy theory view of the world where getting inoculated is equivalent to being 'tagged, tracked and validated"
Vaccinated people can get sick and transmit the virus, true, but it's much less likely that they will. People with STIs can also transmit the virus, so we wear condoms to make the risk of transmission substantially less. If your sexual partner is unwilling to wear a condom or unwilling to have sex with you if you wear one, you can just choose to not have sex with them and the risk of transmission goes to nothing. That choice doesn't exist with work. If my co-worker chooses to remain a massive public health risk, my chances of catching COVID-19 go up quite a bit. I can't choose to just not be around you and the rest of anti-vaxxers. Not to mention there are people who have legitimate medical reasons who are unable to get vaccinated who are put at substantially higher risk by being forced to be around conspiracy theory anti-vaxxers.
That's only disallowed because of the sex angle. If your boss tells you "come to this work sponsored luncheon for a person you hate or be fired", that's not blackmail and is perfectly allowed.
Don't pollute comparisons with situations that have other considerations
You're aware that we've had vaccine mandates for decades, right? Were you also upset about requiring kids get (for example) MMR vaccines before allowing them to attend public school? If so, then congratulations: some diseases we'd thought we'd eradicated have been coming back because of anti-vax nutjobs.
You are not an island. You live in a society, a community of people that requires individuals to give up some personal liberties for the good of the whole. Those who don't like that should go move to an isolated island where their harm to others can be limited.
The person you're replying to has a slightly incorrect statement. At least to my knowledge.
CMS only controls this for patients covered by Medicaid/Medicare. It can set the tone for the entire industry, but does not solely control the industry. Typically, they create influence by setting/rejecting Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement standards. Since enough patients are covered by CMS, it tends to be easier for hospitals to broadly adopt the policies.
It might be a difference without a distinction, but technically the provider is participating, non-participating, or opt-out. In the first two cases, the provider has to meet those standards, and while I'm sure that there might be deltas between how medicare/medicaid patients and non- are covered (e.g. minimum post-procedure length of stays), all of the requirements around the provider apply to everyone at the provider. That is, you can't have one hospital administrator with a degree for the medicaid people and one without for not - the hospital administrators, full stop, have to have the appropriate degrees and certifications.
No, of course not, but that's not what I was referring to - I was referring to, are doctors allowed to leave standing orders for patients? Can they give them over the phone? What kind of procedures can nurses and NPs order? Those sorts of things.
Your example is a covered procedure, some of which is defined by the CMS, but much of it is defined by federal statute that dictates what classes of procedure are covered by medicaid/medicare. To go to your example specifically, federal statute ALREADY limits medicaid abortion coverage to abortions arising from rape, incest, or that put the health of the mother at risk. 16 states go beyond that and cover abortion in more cases, but they pay for that with their own money (which is also allowed statutorily). So in your case, what the new CMS head was declaring is unlawful on its face, as this is something that congress has specifically addressed.
I'm not ok with it, but would be forced to accept that it is within the authority granted to the agency to make that call.
Assuming it is: I think policy measures like that should be subject to medical needs. I think there's a clear medical need to require COVID vaccinations for healthcare workers, but banning abortions doesn't pass that test.
And hell, didn't the Trump administration actually do this, though maybe through different means? Withholding federal funding from providers who offer abortions?
That's the key problem with the US now. Elected representatives are allowed to delegate law making. It breaks the line of accountability. It makes contentious issues worse.
> the key problem with the US now. Elected representatives are allowed to delegate law making.
Congress does not delegate lawmaking, Congress delegates the execution of its powers to the Executive branch. This is how the country has functioned since the beginning, for it would be impractical for it to work otherwise.
Say more: delegation will happen at some level, by definition. In military matters, every step or shot a soldier takes is a decision that has been delegated through a chain of command from Congress. Since Congress is not ever going to be in a position to execute every decision for every individual over which Congress has power, Congress inevitably will delegate the execution of its powers. It has always been this way, and will be this way as long as we have a republic.
> Congress delegates the execution of its powers to the Executive branch
That's the Constitution, not Congress. Regulation, as well, is not execution. Thomas's concurrence on Whitman v. American Trucking Ass’ns signals where things might go.
This is an opinion that was not widely held for most of the last 100 years or so.
> Thomas's concurrence on Whitman v. American Trucking Ass’ns signals where things might go.
Definitely agree that our legal regime looks headed for major changes. I consider it likely that SCOTUS will reverse itself on a set of major principles, creating uncertainty for citizens and businesses until a new equilibrium is reached.
I'd say the key problem is that our electoral system and the structure of our government are broken in a few very serious ways, most of which are nearly impossible to fix, in no small part because fixing most of them would require at least one of our two major political parties to be OK with voting themselves into a weaker position (since some of the most important problems cause there to be only two viable parties at a time and fixing them would weaken the position of both those parties), or else they'd require a constitutional amendment, which is even less likely.
Most of our other problems are a consequence of that.
These are healthcare workers. Jobs have requirements. They're free to quit instead of increasing the dangers of disease for their sick and older patients who are at highest risk for covid. No one is controlling their body any more than making it show up at work in order to get paid. Coal miners are forced to work in dangerous conditions around the world in order to keep their job. Getting a vaccine is far less risk, there have been 8 billion plus vaccine doses given against covid around the world.
If having had an abortion materially negatively impacted a healthcare worker's ability to safely provide healthcare to a sick person, then yes, that should probably be grounds for disallowing those people from working as healthcare practitioners. Thankfully that's not the case.
> what about all the WFH people mandated into vaccines? how does it impact that employer?
Obviously vaccine requirements for remote workers don't make a ton of sense in principle, but in practice I worry that an exemption for remote employees would result in a lot of people getting mis-coded (intentionally or otherwise) as remote and ultimately showing up at work unvaccinated and putting vulnerable people at risk.
How about if it's the 1960s, and you're a flight attendant, and "being sexy" is semi-officially part of your job. And your job is requiring you to get an abortion (which is still illegal in the US, and so you're going to have to go to Sweden to get it). And if you won't, well, nobody's making you - you can get a different job.
This is, as far as I can see, the most directly analogous situation. Those who support vaccine mandates, how do you feel about this situation? (And note that this was just an "unofficial" employee mandate - there was no government entity involved.)
That's a handy way for you to dismiss the point, while completely refusing to engage with it. But that's OK. You can expect whatever you expect.
I think the two situations are comparable in some ways, and not in others. The "have to do something medical in order to keep your job" part is one of the ways it's comparable. The "bodily autonomy" is another. It's different in that it's not a government mandate. It's different in how it affects others.
So: Did you actually want to engage, or did you just want to give a plausible dismissal?
Pregnancy was explicitly added as a protected characteristic under the Civil Rights Act in 1978. Government has a bona fide interest in preventing conduct that could discourage people from becoming pregnant. It has no interest in encouraging people to remain unvaccinated against deadly communicable diseases, and in fact it has an interest in exactly the opposite of that. Accordingly, unvaccinated people aren’t a protected class, nor should they be.
Also, this is a minor point but illegal abortions are many orders of magnitude more risky than COVID vaccines.
I strongly oppose broad-reaching government-imposed vaccine mandates, but I strongly support a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers specifically. The US government has already taken on the responsibility for setting employment eligibility standards for healthcare workers, and it makes sense for being vaccinated to be one of those criteria.
Your intuition is correct (in that there's no over-arching precedent or Constitutionally-derived right that makes it illegal), but it's specifically banned under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as per a 1978 law modifying the act. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/pregnancy-discrimination-act-1...
... Which goes to the court ruling that's the topic of the article: Congress has the power to decide these issues.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately done it a lot lately. We ban that sort of account because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
Most of the argument is whether this requirement is in the "employee must wash hands before surgery" category, which is about the patients' right to be safe not the employee's (in theory the patients didn't "choose" to be there).
The people complaining are reacting as if the ruling sounds like "male high school teachers get vasectomies, to keep teenage pregnancies down", because the effects are "permanent, * upto six months" and directly to your body without it being an on-the-job requirement.
The part that makes me leery is that these sort of "are your vaccines upto-date" checklists have always existed, but this time it is controversial (or maybe it was for MMR - but it wasn't news).
this is also the first time where the vaccine industry and the broader public health space have been put under this kind of scrutiny and the combination of politicization, outright lies and deception over masks and policy in both directions and the overall visibility of the sausage making process happens to be occurring alongside a decline of trust in institutional expertise. when most people got their tetanus shots, the faces of the medical profession were not acting as explicitly political agents.
I don't think you can argue that it's the medical profession's fault that this issue has become politicized without acknowledging that the GOP deserves most of the blame here.
Nearly every common-sense measure implemented during this pandemic has been derided by the right as some sort of unacceptable infringement on individual rights.
Not saying those in power have gotten it all right 100% of the time; I'm especially disappointed with the mask fiasco you mention, but... c'mon. Doctors are not acting as "political agents" in the vast majority of situations that have caused the US's pandemic response to be as lacking as it's been.
frankly there is plenty of blame to go around among partisans starting with the complete and total looting of our pandemic response capabilities that occurred during the obama years or the bipartisan offshoring of nearly all our capacity to produce medical supplies and allowing consolidation to make hospitals utterly brittle in the face of a crisis. the lies and poor decisions are numerous enough from all sides that it really is not interesting to play the blame game about who is worse, residents of either team will always believe their lies were noble and mistakes justified while the 'other' is the source of all the real problems. the end result is the same, efficacy and legitimacy of administrators has cratered and i cannot honestly blame anyone who does not trust these institutions to act in good faith anymore.
> Nearly every common-sense measure implemented during this pandemic has been derided by the right as some sort of unacceptable infringement on individual rights.
It's not common sense if a plurality of people don't agree with it. Denying children in-person schooling for a year wasn't "common sense", cancelling elective procedures like cancer screenings wasn't "common sense", forcing people to wear masks outdoors wasn't "common sense", and so on. Lots of people were denied rights in these cases and would consider those measures unacceptable.
It's common-sense in that the large majority of medical professionals agree that those measures are a good idea. Those ideas are non-controversial amongst experts.
The case for that line of reasoning is extremely weak given that vaccines provide dramatically low protection against infection and vaccinated people also infect others at high rates.
There is no right to not receive another's germs. If we take your argument to its logical conclusion, then the flu vaccine would be mandated. But it's not. So if you say that Covid is different, then what is your threshold or cut-off for when a medical procedure should be mandated?
There is no right to not receive another's germs. If we take your argument to its logical conclusion, then the flu vaccine would be mandated. But it's not. So if you say that Covid is different, then what is your threshold or cut-off for when a medical procedure should be mandated?
Why not? if the cost & benefit ratio is worth it, maybe we should. The same for any other diseases you can think of. If the answer is yes, then there are no reason for any of us to refuse unless we have good excuses.
Identical arguments are made around abortion. Or mandatory organ/blood donations. Actually, nobody argues for mandatory blood donations because we can all tell that would be icky.
Does that mean you support a rollback of all vaccine requirements? For example the MMR, TDap, HepB, polio, chicken pox vaccines required for school children? Or the numerous vaccines required for military personal?
And would you be comfortable having a pediatrician who wasn't inoculated for diphtheria knowing that an infection could be fatal for your baby?
> Does that mean you support a rollback of all vaccine requirements?
I can't speak for the person you're talking to, but those old vaccines are actual vaccines, unlike the recent mRNA injections, which are so different from what we typically think of as vaccines that the CDC had to change its definition of the word "vaccine" to remove the notion that a vaccine provides protection from a disease.
So of course not. The old diseases were serious threats, and the old vaccines were actual vaccines. Not similar to the current situation, where the virus is a negligible threat to all people who are not elderly or suffering from serious disease already, and the injection being proffered does not prevent a person from contracting or transmitting the virus.
Sure, that’s the loophole. What’s happening here is yet another end-run around the democratic process. People are tired of emergency powers, executive orders, and delegated authority being used to enact some of the most impactful laws of our time. We want the Schoolhouse Rock version of law-making because we at least get something of a say in it.
Congress has delegated the authority to make these decisions to regulatory agencies. If congress wants that authority back, they can get it back via legislation. The responsibility for the current situation starts and stops with congress. The executive branch is doing what congress has asked it to do, and the executive branch would stop doing those things the moment that congress legislated the authority back to themselves.
Do you know that the two federal mandates were issued by CMS and by OSHA, two completely different organizations from the CDC?
BTW, the law as written gives very broad powers to OSHA and other agencies. This is controversial mainly because one political side in the country is anti vaccine right now.
People have remedy of sorts in the case of a functioning local market. If some employer requires you to get vaccines and you aren't in to that, you can work somewhere else. If a state has requirements you don't like, you could potentially leave that state. Its different when its the federal government giving the mandate and it covers the entirety of your industry.
My point still stands. Vaccine enforcement and mandates was not even considered as under their purview. It's quite hair-splitting to say "there's nothing that says they _can't start enforcing vaccine mandates_."
“Vaccine enforcement and mandates was not even considered as under their purview.”
Even if the law as written allowed it? Since the OSHA act and Social security acts that give OSHA and CMS regulatory authority passed, the USA has never faced a deadly virus pandemic that could be combated with a vaccine.
If Congress specifically wrote the law to allow flexibility for new situations it doesn’t make sense to me to argue that because the situation didn’t arise in the 20th century that the authority and law has lost its power.
Right, that's my point -- this is unprecedented and thus falls under "Congress needs to allow these agencies to do this" _not_ "these agencies can do this by default."
Even though Congress already wrote a law that gave the agencies authority to do unprecedented actions?
What I'm not seeing is engagement with the actual text of the statutes that Congress already wrote and put on the books. For instance, the OSHA Act specifically gave OSHA power to regulate "new hazards".
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2019-title29/html... "1) The Secretary shall provide, without regard to the requirements of chapter 5 of title 5, for an emergency temporary standard to take immediate effect upon publication in the Federal Register if he determines (A) that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards, and (B) that such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger."
Similarly the Social Security act already gave broad power to issue regulations. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1395hh# "such regulations as may be necessary to carry out the administration of the insurance programs under this subchapter" "No rule, requirement, or other statement of policy (other than a national coverage determination) that establishes or changes a substantive legal standard governing the scope of benefits, the payment for services, or the eligibility of individuals, entities, or organizations to furnish or receive services or benefits under this subchapter shall take effect unless it is promulgated by the Secretary by regulation under paragraph (1)."
the Act clearly envisions the secretary having authority to change standards for benefits, payment for services, and eligibility. There's no limitation saying that eligibility criteria can be based on other safety measures, but not vaccines.
Not really, for instance courts did examine the CDC eviction mandate and found it was overreaching the language of the law and voided it. I agree with that as the law provided examples of the power it was giving and the eviction mandate clearly didn’t fit with the others (fumigation, quarantine of positive cases, etc).
A mandate for vaccinating healthcare seems a lot closer to existing regulations that the law was designed to allow. It’s clearly a health and safety regulation just like the dozens of previous health regulations regulating quarantine, mask wearing, sanitation, safe handling of items, etc.
The reason congress doesn’t reserve this power is because in our system congress can’t react quickly or sometimes at all. It has to pass laws giving up this type of authority to the executive branch because it knows its own processes don’t work quickly or efficiently enough.
Congress did give itself instead the authority to veto regulations it doesn’t like, using the Congressional Review Act. It used to give itself even stronger authority using the one-house legislative veto, but the Supreme Court struck that down. < https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...>
> Congress has delegated the authority to make these decisions to regulatory agencies
Yes, but at some point there must be a limit to how much power they can delegate. If Congress created a new Super-Congress that it granted all the powers of Congress, I would contend that would be unconstitutional. It clearly goes against the founding principles of having three branches of government. That would be akin to the government creating a fourth branch without amending the constitution.
Amending the constitution is a process that is clearly defined by the constitution. If that process isn't needed to create a fourth branch of government, a change that changes the core of the constitution, what would it ever be needed for and why would they have included it?
...except for the delegation of power to mandate vaccines apparently, which is the focus of this discussion.
If we are going to talk about what's the right answer from a position of "if the court says it that's how it goes" then I can assume you're happy with this court decision?
Yes, I'm happy with it from a "balance of power" perspective. I would like a different outcome, regarding vaccine mandates, but that responsibility lies with congress, and unfortunately one of our political parties is anti-science and anti-vaccine, which means it won't happen.
Still, I'm happy that we're not breaking the rules for the convenience of getting an outcome I'd like better.
Should Congress also pass laws regarding which vaccines are mandated for military personal serving in which areas of the world? For example, if the risk of yellow fever increases in Yemen, should Congress pass a law requiring special forces deployed in that area must acquire the vaccine? Or should that decision be left to the appointed heads of those branches of the military?
I thought this was pretty well-discussed as VRBPAC/ACIP began to review the data guiding their third dose/booster recommendations but maybe I've misunderstood.
> Could you imagine a news report about how the much touted vaccine efficacy of 95% didn't really pan out?
It didn’t pan out because of Delta, a way more infectious variant that became common well after the 95% figure was determined.
And it’s fully accurate to say that despite Delta, the vaccines are effective at preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death. I think that’s a very good thing!
Anyone who took a biology class and paid attention could have told you that an efficacy-killing variant was an inevitability. Hell, even tinfoil hat Alex Jones said the same thing, and was for that specific instance, vindicated entirely. The top virologists didn't just "not take this into account", they willfully withheld this truth of how viruses operate in order to push a flakey, quickly-deteriorating product into people's arms.
So that "95%" figure was a lie to begin with, because those who touted it knew exactly what was going to happen. Viruses evade, and any non-sterilizing vaccine will be evaded by a virus. This is how you get delta, this is how you get omicron (which, by the way, was first found in fully vaccinated individuals and likely created through this evolutionary pressure).
The 95% efficacy claim was the result of a scientific study of the efficacy of the vaccine against COVID infection. It was definitely not a lie unless you are an insane person with an outrageous definition of what a "lie" is.
If virologists weren't talking about it, how did you learn about it? Do you know enough about virology (or immunology as this would be) that I should listen to you over them?
If the vaccines don't work, why do people in the real world die much, much less often from covid once they are vaccinated?
If you are so sure an immune-evading variant will emerge, why hasn’t one? (There is no evidence at all that omicron evades the vaccines).
You shouldn't listen and believe anyone solely on the basis of their person. Many "scientists" or "experts" that you might believe in have financial ties and liabilities / political liabilities that prevent them from utilizing their expertise to full capacity. The world, money, and politics naturally suppress truth. The government told you the vaccines would stop the spread, limit deaths, and bring us back to "normal". Have you seen the numbers? Have you seen the quarantine camps? Upwards of 50% of COVID cases in some countries are among the vaccinated. Not mentioning vaccine injuries / deaths which the "experts" have told us are rare, but are bleeding more and more into each person's living reality.
Vaccine evasion is happening, and it doesn't matter whether it's delta or omicron. Would Pfizer pay for a study that proves their vaccines are worthless? Would Fauci, who hands down government money in the form of grants, give a grant for a study that would demolish the pharma companies that he has his money tied to?
The vaccines obviously have SOME efficacy, but just enough to make a product that sells. If someone sold you a new car, and didn't tell you it would break down 6 months down the road, wouldn't you be angry? They polished the car just enough for you to buy, without telling you what lurked in the shadows the entire time.
Virologists knew the roll-out of a non-sterilizing vaccine would end in the scenario we currently have. Period.
And the people peddling misinformation have no financial benefit? They don’t want you to subscribe to their patreon or their newsletter? Watch their YouTube videos?
Also the reason Pfizer or other people pay for studies that may disprove their drugs is because they actually don’t know whether the drugs work or not! They are paying to find out. Studies fail all the time. You’ve picked one of the most successful studies and treatments of all time to show the system is rigged. Look at all the ones that didn’t work. Why doesn’t Merck, the largest pharma company, have a vaccine? If it’s so easy to fabricate the data, why didn’t they? Why didn’t their virologists lie? Is Merck the only honest pharma company?
> Anyone who took a biology class and paid attention could have told you that an efficacy-killing variant was an inevitability
On what basis? It's proved impossible so far to make a strongly efficacious flu vaccine because of constantly shifting variants. But on the other hand, there are many examples of successful vaccines that have never had an efficacy-killing variant emerge (polio, smallpox, chicken pox). How would anyone who has taken a biology class know a priori whether COVID-19 would be a flu or a polio?
Those vaccines are/were sterilizing, meaning the vaccinated person cannot carry or spread the illness after vaccination. Covid-19 Vaccines are non-sterilizing and only lessen-symptoms. As we can clearly see, vaccinated individuals still spread the virus. Not only that, but vaccinated individuals are an added evolutionary pressure for the virus, which causes the emergence of vaccine-evading variants. This means new variants can bubble up within vaccinated individuals, like we've seen with Omicron (and most likely the case for Delta as well).
It's not that simple. The Salk polio vaccine did not prevent infection/transmission, but remained highly effective at preventing disease.
The initial studies on vaccine efficacy were designed to study efficacy at preventing serious illness, not transmission. So it was not known at the time how effective the vaccines would be on that dimension. To answer these questions requires novel research, it is not settled, freshmen biology knowledge.
This cannot be used as an argument against vaccination though. The same thing happens if the population has a high percentage of people who got sick with covid, except that in that case there is a much higher death toll.
Delta was first detected on india where at that time there was barely any vaccination coverage. And nobody knows from where omicron originated. You claim it could be leaky vaccines but it could have easily been from an immune compromised individual. Do you have any sources for the claim it was first found in a vaccinated individual ? I couldn't find any online
To often we see procedure propriety as government interference in free society
Which is it?
Maybe social utilitarianism is all there is?
Maybe the rest is just being left alone. Formal demands by churches their flock act as social missionaries and stewards to save others souls being LARPed in a secular world.
Why do I have to care about inside these machines and not just the machines (organic or synthetic)?
There are separate needs due to physics that we cannot let our imaginations of unfettered freedom disabuse us of.
That will lead to mistrust; if moral relativism is fine for anti-vaxxers, why not open hostility? My biology cannot control itself in all situations.
We don’t let a chainsaw wielding psycho live in his own world. That’s based on real world observation of the outcomes.
How is viral transmission that can be measured physically, even though it requires some specific tools, be considered any less violent towards others than a chainsaw wielding knob? Our evidence comes from the same observable space as our evidence a chainsaw wielding knob is unsafe.
Philosophical wankery does not change the physical truth.
> Everything is a crisis and someone can solve it if they're just given the right permissions.
That's a facile statement. I'd have to bait an HN into playing devil's advocate just to get an opposing view.
What are the "Zig and Rust" of protecting democracy in a time of crisis? Or maybe more realistically-- if we want a "Zig and Rust" for making democracy "memory safe," what are the sources to start with? (Note: I'll filter any citations that rely on invisible hands or, "let's start by decentralizing all the thingies")
> That's a good point. You can agree that its within the federal authority to mandate vaccines, but it really should be a decision made and explicitly endorsed by elected representatives rather than some agency (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) that I have never heard of until now and whose head is appointed by one person.
Jacobson v. Massachusetts[1] established that it is within the State's power to mandate vaccinations, so shouldn't this be up to individual states? I'm also pro- nationwide mandatory vaccinations, but Congress also doesn't seem to be the right way to do it.
Sidenote, if you haven't heard of CMS, that speaks more to your lack of experience in this area than the org's obscurity. I'm not saying everyone should know it, but your paranthetical downplaying of the org shows you're not deep in healthcare knowledge. Should it mean anything to us as readers that you personally never heard of a key agency?
> Could you imagine a news report about how the much touted vaccine efficacy of 95% didn't really pan out? It's true. Everyone was around 6 months ago and remembered the efficacy levels being thrown around. Now people are being gaslit to thinking they didn't hear what they heard and its about hospitalization. All because being honest could hurt the cause. And yes, vaccine efficacy was 95% and yes it does mean what you think it means [0]
This is not true at all. Media has been talking openly about "waning immunity" and "declining effectiveness" all along.
In what universe should such important public health decisions be made by elected officials largely ignorant of basic science, whom also represent also represent some of the most uneducated and misinformed people alive?
There’s a reason, for example, why we don’t let the market or public opinion dictate the efficiency or safety of drugs.
And when some department of unelected officials test radioactive oatmeal on children or infects people with syphilis, we somehow ignore these issues and pretend like that it would never happen to us.
I agree with your facts, but I think its a little disingenuous to only highlight that one aspect of the context. It wasn't that many months before that when a lot of people were willing to accept 50+% VE and delighted if it could approach 70%.
I remember that too, and I think its needed context.
> That's a good point. You can agree that its within the federal authority to mandate vaccines, but it really should be a decision made and explicitly endorsed by elected representatives rather than some agency (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) that I have never heard of until now and whose head is appointed by one person.
Are you aware that Federal regulatory agencies are a result of Congress delegating their power, mostly to the executive branch? Congress has already delegated their authority…
Garbage ruling from the least democratic branch of government in the US. The whole project of "dismantling the administrative state" of which this decision rolls up to is absolutely insane in 2021 and will lead this country to a path of ruin. This decision is part of a much larger play by Federalist Society judges to remove the ability of our government to do virtually anything.
>Garbage ruling from the least democratic branch of government in the US.
Is... that meant to be a bad thing? Yes, judicial branch should not be directly accountable to voters. In fact, as a Canadian, I find the idea of electing judges to be so thoroughly strange that it almost defies belief. Why the hell would you want your judicial branch to be "democratic", as in directly and immediately beholden to the whims of the mob? It should be behind layers of indirection, only generally accountable to the voters, and with a long lag to boot.
They are not accountable to politicians though, not on a continuous basis. They are appointed by politicians for a fixed or life term. This is the important difference - elect politicians to well-paid full-time jobs of (among other things) appointing judges and prosecutors, and then let them spend the time doing it right, and then don't have those judges/prosecutors have to continuously be checking in with what the voters or the politicians who appointed them want, in the moment. That last part is key.
But yes, if you have garbage politicians they will at some point start appointing garbage judges, garbage crown attorneys, etc. and the system breaks down. So, like, get better politicians (by which I really mean become better voters).
It shouldn't be democratic, but for a non-democratic institution, the Supreme Court in the U.S. has outsized power at a level not originally intended in the constitution.
In Wisconsin, where I live, certain judicial offices are elected. Judicial elections are as nakedly partisan as you might fear, and it fosters no confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary. Based on my understanding (as a generally conservative libertarian), many decisions are predicated on conservative political promises and ideology, rather than any sound legal reasoning.
But at least you know judges political affiliation, officially. The worst thing is when judges try to hide it, pretending to be impartial, objective, basically demigods free of typical human flaws.
>In fact, as a Canadian, I find the idea of electing judges to be so thoroughly strange that it almost defies belief. Why the hell would you want your judicial branch to be "democratic", as in directly and immediately beholden to the whims of the mob?
As a Briton I agree. It's also why I'm quite sceptical of the concrete benefits of a directly elected House of Lords and the replacement of the monarchy with a presidential system which are popular ideas in some political circles. I'm no fan ideologically of the trappings of a landed gentry and there's plenty of room for heavy reforms there but having a strictly apolitical head of state and a semi-technocratic oversight body has its advantages. Democracy isn't necessarily measured by the amount of government positions which are directly or indirectly elected - there's more nuances than that.
There's a quiet and small (there are tens of us! Tens, I say!) group of Americans who aren't so sure de facto direct election of the President is a good idea (in fact, it isn't direct, and wasn't intended to be, but in effect sort-of is direct, because the system wasn't set up to defend against what amounts to a variety of attacks on it that broke it almost immediately and gave us what we still have today, which is a worst-of-both-worlds hybrid) or that changing our Senate so that they're directly elected was the right move.
We have unelected officials who are making decisions against the will of the people. The entire system is too large for any person to affect change. That is why we see “crises;” they allow people to focus the group onto a crisis. In normal times, the entire industry reverts to how can they increase their size..
I voted for the guy who nominated Pai as a commissioner and against the guy who nominated Pai to be the chairman and I voted for two senators who voted against his nomination to be chairman. I also voted for the guy who kicked his ass to the curb.
I didn't vote for the guys who made the decision to buy the F35, who audited my tax return, or who wrote the manual on uniform traffic control devices (and among all of these I have the most beef with them). But I voted for and against their bosses. I really really don't want my local mail carrier being an elected position, I and you and they have better things to do.
this country isn't a direct democracy, lets not act like it should be just when we disagree with the actions of those elected. These arguments are simply asinine because you know damn well this isn't how things work or were meant to work. You don't like the rule written by one 'unelected' lawyer in the executive branch so you are happy with it being overturned by another 'unelected' lawyer in the judicial branch...
and i'll add to my own comment because honestly this line of argument just infuriates me.
define 'made the decision'. Who made the decision by your estiamtion? was it the president who directed aides to implement a vaccine mandate? was it the aid who decided it was most appropriate to do through CMS? was it the head of CMS who directed individuals in his organization? Was it the person who actually fired up microsoft word and WROTE the text? The person who published the final rule?
Your argument is a straw man to try and give the veneer of a high minded process complaint to something you simply disagree with on substance. It is characteristic of certain groups and it is unfortunately rarely actively critiqued. It has become common place and is fundamentally disruptive to productive discourse.
I have no idea what you mean. The judges blocked only one course of action, so they aren't removing the ability of the government to do anything.
Also, they explicitly said that Congress should do it, as our elected representatives. That's basically putting the authority where it belongs, if it exists. That's not about preventing government from doing anything.
And what's wrong with dismantling the administrative state? Many industries are already over-regulated because there are so many agencies, so many rules, and often, those rules conflict. The administrative state is a hindrance to progress and innovation because it keeps new players from entering the field.
Why do you think that "dismantling" it will lead to ruin?
Fortunately we are a multi-layered system of government and your State's Governor may be able to direct some public health response tailored to your State's unique needs. I think this was the correct ruling and I can not understand why someone would want the President of the United States to be able to direct my medical treatment. Or is it that only particular Presidents would be able to execute this power, how do you control that?
The “least democratic branch”, as you say, just blocked a very undemocratic order in favor of just using the democratic process and going through congress.
Not sure what you’re complaining about. You seem to both want more and less democracy at the same time. Just because the president is elected doesn’t make him a king, and doesn’t make anything he does democratic.
Good. Courts aren't democratic on purpose, they exist to interpret the law as enacted. "The courts should rule based solely on what the law says and not what some people with an agenda wish it meant" shouldn't be a partisan issue but apparently it is these days.
If you don't like the law, get Congress to change it.
This is a temporary injunction not a ruling on the merits. Just like Democratic judges doing this to Trump, it's far more likely to be influenced by politics of the particular Judge or Court of Appeals that any meaningful statement of the law (which it is not).
Also basically every response to this thread regarding this is claiming the courts have decided this, which is just sensational conversation. There very well could be something more to this, but it's more likely that the judge is just airing on "let's dig into this deeper before allowing this change" which makes sense. Nothing has been concluded, the status quo remains.
1. I'm a former Federal litigator. LMAO. And both Parties here. Welcome to America. That's why they filed this in LA + roll up to 11th Cir. Dems file in WA or HI which rolls to the 9th. State Courts are infinitely worse based on the different experience of close friends working in Chicago area v. Northern Indiana.
2. Every temporary injunction issued in the litigation surrounding the wall and Muslim ban was conducted with the Democratic version of this same strategy.
This is the game. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. We will learn the law in time.
Correct. Three other factors need to be balanced as well, although LOS definitely the big one. That doesn't make the PI correct, it doesn't even mean that the court will reach the same decision on the merits in Summary Judgement or after a bench trial, and it definitely doesn't make the PI decision the law.
Rejecting a compulsory measure not “anti-science,” and using that term in that manner displays a dogmatism that is decidedly unscientific. It is quite coherent to accept the consensus epidemiological realities of COVID, the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, and simultaneously disagree with compulsory measures to enforce treatment.
Agreed but in this specific context the issue concerns healthcare workers. Vaccines are mandatory in the army for obvious reasons, ones that are even more relevant for healthcare workers.
I agree that certain forums require perhaps different compulsory actions, and for healthcare certainly the case for more stringent requirements can be made. Nonetheless my previous reply remains accurate, it is quite possible to coherently argue against them in this context, at minimum by way of their political mechanism of enforcement, while also accepting the consensus scientific views.
Please keep nationalistic flamebait off HN. It leads to nationalistic flamewar, which is a form of internet hell (fortunately a relatively avoidable one).
Whilst thousands of healthcare workers in the US —- those who are supposed to be proponents of public health measures and rational, scientific thinking - refuse to get vaccinated, ultimately resulting in stockpiles of vaccines getting destroyed … people in third world countries cannot get adequate access to vaccines. This is madness.
Vaccines should not be a personal freedom choice. They are a life saving invention, where did we go as a society that this is suddenly up for debate? Antivaxxers on HN of all places, what the hell.
To get it out of the way, I’m fully vaxxed and I don’t think it should be mandated.
No people aren’t being rounded up and stuck with needles against their will. Getting fired from a job is a big deal. Not being able to pay bills or buy food or care for a family, no health insurance, that’s a big deal. Surely you’re bright enough to distinguish between “forced full stop” or “forced and in extremely dire financial straits.”
What if I told you there was a new federal mandate that requires you to get a tattoo of my choosing on your forehead. If you don’t, you lose your job.
You are making a categorically, and objectively false, equivalence. But I suspect you know that.
If your job requires interacting with other people, then your not being vaccinated directly risks the health and life of those people. You don't get to say "it's my choice to intentionally risk harm to others" and then say "it's illegal to stop me from doing that".
For example, no one is required to be licensed as a doctor, but you don't get to do surgery on people if you aren't licensed.
The law doesn't prevent people from being alcoholics, but you don't get to be a drunk bus driver.
I can have a beer in the piazza with my friends in Europe. I can even have one in the car as long as I'm a passenger and the driver isn't drinking. People can build a 6-unit building in most areas in most towns. They can start a business without being required to provide a sea of parking.
Another enviable feature of European democracies is that the group that receives the most votes ends up being the group in power.
Plenty to dislike as well, but it's always a compromise.
Also, 'personal freedom' comments are ... pretty ironic today of all days. "Tell me you're a dude without writing you're a dude".
I agree with your sentiment, but the part about third world countries getting adequate access is more complicated than simply lacking access to shipments.
In many parts of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, hesitancy, misinformation on social media, and lack of adequate institutions is now more of a hindrance than getting shipments.
I hope more people read this comment. I think there is a common misconception that we're hoarding vaccine while people in 3rd world countries are begging for it. That's just not true as far as I can tell. The vaccine hesitancy seems to be universal. I guess we can blame the internet for that too.
> Whilst thousands of healthcare workers in the US —- those who are supposed to be proponents of public health measures and rational, scientific thinking - refuse to get vaccinated [...]
These people were considered heroes last year (and overwhelmingly exposed to this virus while everyone else stayed at home). Now their judgment is in question because they won't follow the herd, with all of their medical experience/expertise being rejected or discredited. The inconsistency is a work of art.
"Hero" and "Good decision-maker" aren't covariant signals.
Most footsoldiers who die in a war are considered heroes, and people can consider them that without holding in their heads at the same time the idea those soldiers would have made good generals.
Your comment is based on the same strategies as the headlines and the book talks about. Define "These people". Hasty Generalization. "These people" don't move in unison like a school of fish, and every good faith reader knows that. There's no inconsistency.
> These people = doctors, nurses, etc (medical professionals).
Those professions were considered heroic, not every single person individually. Yes, many that served those positions well were individually celebrated too. The ones that didn't, and there were plenty, had their judgment heavily questioned, even last year.
Drawing conclusions about an individual based on a broad category they happen to fall into is "hasty generalization", by the book.
DO you unironically quite believe that this people do not believe in what they do?
Do you think that medicine is a nothing or all kind of thing?
DO you believe that those who do not trust big companies that have paid millions in criminal fines, reject the rest of medicine?
You are simply not Supposed to "believe" in science that is reedit tier thinking, Science is a process and in such process mistrusting leaky vaccines that reduce T cells amounts is ok.
Medical Science is not monolithic.
> clearly do not believe in medical science doing working in a medical capacity
Or... the people who know the most about the tradeoffs and benefits of this particular vaccine have done a cost/benefit analysis and rejected it? I'd be curious to see if they're rejecting this particular (experimental, rushed, based-on-unproven-mRNA technology) vaccine but not, say, the mumps or rubella vaccines.
And yet the vaccination rate within the medical community is consistently higher than the general population (90% vs 70% in the UK).
(Edit: although it is plausible that this is due to some bias in the statistics - e.g. medical workers are expected to be working age adults (who are statistically more likely to be vaccinated anyway), and the general population is obviously a wider range)
So does this suggest that those in the know are more likely to be vaccinated? Or that those in the know are taking a wait-and-see approach?
> So does this suggest that those in the know are more likely to be vaccinated? Or that those in the know are taking a wait-and-see approach?
My... estimate? Gut feel? I do not have data... is that medical workers are at least no less likely than others of their same age group to get vaccinated. They may well be more likely to get vaccinated.
But there are holdouts by the thousands, some of whom are willing to quit their high-paying jobs in order to avoid the vaccine. I don't think they're all just stubborn idiots. I think that at least many of them have done their own risk assessment, and decided that it wasn't worth it.
On the other hand, others have gotten vaccinated, by the tens or hundreds of thousands, and they aren't all idiots or sheep, either.
So... my read of the behavior of the people in the field is that the evidence leads toward the vaccines being worth it, but it's not as clear-cut as the media tells us. But I'm trying to use psychology to judge a matter of medical technology, and who knows if that approach is even halfway valid...
I think of it less as madness and more as the constant structure of power in homo sapiens society.
For thousands of years, privileged citizens of empires have gotten more rights and better treatment than non-citizens and foreigners. Some humans are just born into a position where they don't need to fear for their life or fight to survive. This is true even in the US; all over the country, in the same square mile, you will find people starving, and people throwing away good food; people rejecting a vaccine just to exercise their personal power, and people waiting 8 hours outside in freezing cold to get one. Our societies seem destined for injustice.
Rules and laws. The virus does not care about these. At all. It does not care about your race, it does not care about your age. It doesn't care about your employment status, gender, religion, disability, nationality, wealth, or anything else. All it cares about is if it can replicate. As we debate and discuss and argue if laws and rules are justified or not, the virus simply ignores everything and does what it has been doing since it existed. The virus does not obey borders and mandates. It doesn't obey leaders, it doesn't obey power. Perhaps the end doesn't justify the means. Perhaps it's time we rethink how we respond. Either way, the virus doesn't care what you think. It moves as best it can.
What has this got to do with anything? Beating a straw man "the virus will wait for legislation" while implying all the "debate and discuss" isn't important.
Also, the virus does care about the things you mention, insofar as they affect infection vectors i.e. If you don't have the power to avoid situations that put you at risk.
The point is it won't acknowledge legislation. It can't be stopped with pen strokes. You will never be able to bargain with it. You can't even communicate with it.
A pen signing a cheque to pay for vaccine could stop the virus.
If you mean the virus is literally not stopped by legislation, nor is it literally sentient; who made such a claim? How is the insentient nature of the virus anything but an irrelevant tangent?
>A pen signing a cheque to pay for vaccine could stop the virus.
You can bring a horse to water, but I'll have to force it out for you. The virus is an unstoppable force of nature. It exists in cats, dogs, ferrets, fruit bats, gorillas, hamsters, minks, sea otters, pumas, snow leopards, tigers, hyenas, tree shrews and whitetail deer. It exists in all continents. Your pen and cheque are temporary counter-measures at best.
What I find most interesting is the private-sector scenarios and how they're playing out.
I have relatives who work in healthcare and refuse to get the vaccine. They're at risk of losing their jobs because regardless of external pressure, the hospital employing them is incentivized to let them go by the patients. They're a hospital focused on physical therapy, which is does as much elective business by volume as prescribed... And very few patients are willing to work with a physical therapist who isn't vaccinated, so they're simply losing business as word-of-mouth gets around that they don't require vaccines and patients sign up for their PT regiments with other hospitals in the region.
By the same token that the government (absent a law from Congress) perhaps can't force organizations to employ vaccinated staff, the government may have no say if an individual employee is fired because an organization requires vaccinated staff of their own accord.
This would be a good time for Congress to show some leadership and lay down some legal guidelines.
Oh I didn't mean pass a law authorizing the executive to force vaccines.
I mean this would be a good time for Congress to show leadership in general. As in, make a decision. Really, any decision that shows some reasoning behind it. Entirely too many people in the service of legislature are more worried about their electability than doing a good job. There's a reason that branch has, on average, a mid-teens approval rating most of the time.
Mandates are probably not going to work but what would work is denying insurance claims. If someone ends up in a hospital occupying an ICU bed for an illness that could have been prevented by a vaccine widely and freely available then insurance companies (and medicare) should refuse to pay thousands of dollars for their treatment. It was their choice not to use preventative care available.
The estate yes, I imagine that is what they do in the case of a death not caused by covid? I've also been wondering when insurance will begin denying claims for this, there's a basically free option to prevent most hospital stays, vs thousands in bills to pay, this is the responsible business decision to make in my mind.
Anecdotal evidence would appear to support the conclusion that work-based mandates do increase vaccination numbers. People would rather get their shots than lose their jobs.
Obesity is much harder to prevent than going to the pharmacy and getting a free shot (and going back a month later and doing it again). Comparing easy to hard doesn’t make sense.
I’m all for the libertarian solution here: just charge people who refuse to get vaxxed more in premiums to fund their future more expensive Covid treatments. It should not be considered a preexisting condition. This would extend to group plans, except since the risk is all pooled, it would have to be for workplaces that don't mandate the vaccine. And areas of the country that have low vaccination rates should necessarily have higher insurance rates given that vaccines require mass adoption to be effective.
That also doesn't work because that same precedent can be used for other preventative health issues such as obesity. "Well, you shouldn't have been eating all those cheeseburgers, sorry"
I think you have a point, it's a fine line, but say there was a shot which could prevent you from becoming obese and all the problems that come with it? Now I'm going to kind of argue against myself here, but as I write this I think a better comparison would be Flu, you can get a Flu shot and pretty much stay out of the hospital. People end up in the hospital with Flu every year and insurance covers that. I guess this is all to say after some reflection, I can see both sides to the argument.
Is it just this specific situation that causes you to feel that way? Or should all diseases which have some amount of preventative protocol be treated the same, perhaps STDs?
And what about other choices that impact emergency care? Obesity related illness and injuries, smoking and other cancer-inducing habits, dangerous activities such as motor sports and rock climbing, workplace injuries without appropriate PPE, auto accidents without helmets and seat belts, etc.
And who is it that gets to be the moral arbiter of what is acceptable? To me, it seems like whoever is in power. What happens when “the other side” from your perspective wins an election cycle?
This is why nationalized/ government healthcare implementations, even at the level of Obamacare, are so dangerous.
It literally gives government moral authority over who deserves care and who doesn't. "Universal" healthcare, as long as you're part of the universe that does exactly what the government tells you to do.
Which is why when social policies are adopted, they must be implemented as a minimum, not a maximum.
You should be allowed to have whatever private health care or sharing, etc you want, while having some basic amount of care commonly available. There will always be limits. Rich people can afford to hire their own private doctor and nurses. We can't realistically afford that for every individual.
And we have already identified these things really. From preventative care and reproductive health options which can be found free of charge, to things like EMTALA granting emergency care to everyone.
Identify the things which are fundamental and provide those to everyone, and allow the upper echelons and unique needs to operate in free market.
And what do you propose happens to vaccinated people who occupy ICU beds?
Or, for that matter, to other groups of people with an "illness that could have been prevented by a widely and freely available measure"?
A few spring to mind immediately – obesity first and foremost.
In broad terms, I agree with your approach: incentives at the personal level. Bottom-up. But in many countries (mine included, in EU), "health insurance" is really just a tax. There's no connection between your health & behaviour, and the "insurance" cost or fulfillment. So what you propose would essentially amount to privatizing health care, or at least turning it from an income tax into real insurance.
I got one for you, we can prevent 80% of covid deaths and hospitalizations and reduce other diseases and get universal healthcare because the cost would be much less...Just ban fast foods. Make everyone exercise and that would be mandated by government. It would much less intrusive than requiring someone to inject something into their body.
>A bit under half of Americans have already caught covid
No- that many have had a positive test or other diagnosis confirming covid.
There were plenty of non-hospitalized, non-diagnosed cases before the tests existed. And plenty of people have had it and never saw a reason to get a test to confirm it.
So that's not quite true. The CDC provides the estimate you're talking about which is what my post originally cites (~146mm Americans infected). That's their estimate based on the much smaller number of positive tests and hospitalizations, using their models about how many cases are missed by surveillance.
makes me wonder if repeated exposure that doesn't result in the virus replicating enough to take hold in the body gives you any kind of immunity, or if that is even a possibility. like how many viral bodies does it take, just 1?
I think that the death rate stays intake in the best case scenario. It could be higher than the Delta rate though, we don't know yet. But you know, I have no reasons to believe that we are so lucky, and even importantly, we deserve the best case scenario. US is crazy. Courts all over the country halt COVID protections measures. Republicans in the house don't want to prevent the government shutdown because of the vaccine mandates for private sector. Anti-vaxx rhetoric is stronger than ever before. So, people continue to die because dysfunctional government can't get their sh*t together. One party goes all-in with cultural war, conspiracy theories and sabotages everything. The other party is so weak that they can't execute the agenda of their own president.
So far we don't have enough data to say how it compares to previous variants. Even with the other variants, most cases are mild and it can take several weeks to start seeing the more severe cases getting worse.
Please fix the headline to match the one on the article. The Hacker News headline is deeply misleading, because vaccine mandates imposed by US states and cities are not affected by this court action.
And it’s a common refrain of “follow the science” dogmatists to attempt to paint things as “objective facts” in a decidedly unscientific way. Just what “measurable numbers” are you referring to and what “objective facts” do you think they reveal?
You would be very hard pressed to find a self respecting scientist who calls any of their work “objective fact.” There are several ways to display views that are “anti-basic science,” and you are displaying one of them.
But to try and wrangle your question into what I think it was intending (though severely misled such that I needed the above preamble): Do I believe established high probability scientific consensus and recommendations can be discarded or disagreed with as mere opinion? Absolutely not. I am not at all “anti-basic science” in the way that you think I am. I think it’s quite possible to accept the scientific consensus on COVID as it exists so far and still argue currently against mandatory vaccinations in different settings.
If you can't convince, compelling doesn't tend to work much better, unless you threaten something worse. Given that unvaxed people are worried the vaccine may kill them, threatening career change seems a bit pointless...it would be far better to listen to their concerns and talk to them, threats only confirm the conspiracies and force positions to become entrenched.
This was my initial gut thought, but an employment lawyer helped me seee that most healthcare workers are not university or college educated and they are basically lower middle class.
In other words most healthcare workers share the same demographics as those who currently have low uptake on the vaccine.
Yep. For every doctor or nurse with 4+ years of postsecondary education, there are 5+ people with 2 or fewer years of postsecondary education, I'd bet.
The lower tiers of nurse only require 2 years, IIRC, and I think those are more like technical programs than typical liberal-arts-informed degrees. Then there's the clerks, the front-desk people (to include the ones at the "front desk" of each floor, department, or section of the hospital, plus the ones at the actual main entrance[s]) the cleaning and housekeeping staff (someone has to go around restocking supplies and such), the entire billing department, the people who come around to bug sick people about their insurance details, the security guards (hospitals have lots of them), and so on.
This assumes that only uneducated uninformed people are choosing to not get vaccinated. It couldn't possibly be that they understand natural immunity still provides immunity, or that the risk in their group and based on their health is very low, or that they've learned how bureaucracy can be used to influence the medical community... not like they had to learn about the atrocities committed by the medical community in the past, and how bureaucracy was used to promote things that are now seen as unethical and mistakes.
Or maybe they are aware of drugs that received authorization in the past and that the same companies that are making bank of the vaccines, don't have the best history with being honest and transparent.
If the vaccine were still as effective as it was a year ago, I'd agree with you, but it's likely that the current vaccine will have a muted effect on omicron variant, so I'm not as comfortable mandating a vaccine for a now-dead variant.
> All medical procedures should be voluntary, or we go back to the times of lobotomy and forced sterilizations of minorities (and that's not as many decades back as you may think).
Just wanted to add this comment from the middle of this discussion.
There is so much irrationality these days that we need to have a solid foundation for our decision making and not based on the whims of the panicked masses.
Wow... I thought it was just tinfoil hat types that were avoiding this vaccine because they were afraid Bill Gates was using it to implant a tracking chip inside them. But if healthcare workers - who actually know what's in this thing - are so vaccine-hesitant that the government has to mandate it to them, I'm suddenly worried whether or not I should think twice about getting a booster (or worse, giving it to my children).
As a Britisher, is there an ELI5 explanation on why so many Americans are opposed to the vaccination, even educated people working in healthcare? It all seems very bizarre to me...
People dying from the virus is useful to an opposition party when they want to argue that the ruling party is doing a bad job and should be replaced.
Things like vaccines also threaten the status of people who use the virus in order to extract money from their audiences, like megachurch preachers and snake oil salesmen. Some people got really wealthy off Ivermectin and HCQ prescriptions during this whole thing.
The problem that so many have is that the mandates completely ignore other ways to gain immunity and the fact that not everyone can get the vaccine. Right now the one single line from the government is "Everyone should get vaccinated, it's safe an effective".
To anyone paying attention it's obvious that this is not the case. Everyone should not get vaccinated, some folks can't get the vaccine. And not it's not safe and effective for everyone, some have had a bad reaction.
It would be one thing if the government realized this and placed reasonable exceptions for those who either can't get it or don't need to because they have natural immunity or immunity through monoclonal antibodies. But they don't and they continue to push this one way of getting immunity.
And that's where the distrust forms. More and more it seems that the government doesn't actually give a damn about these edge cases, all they want to do is check the box that says you have been vaccinated.
I don't know if you're being disingenuous, but health care workers is a very wide group of people; most probably have absolutely no idea about 'whats in this thing', and in my experience most doctors are vaccinated --- it's hospital staff that aren't.
The doctors here in Montana I've talked to about it are not exactly advertising it but are unvaccinated and have recommended to me to avoid the vaccine and one intimated it's insane to vaccinate children.
So that's not the case with all doctors.
Then again, I'm fit, healthy, great diet, low stress, eat well, lots of sunlight. Covid poses less risk to me than driving, my kids it doesn't rise to the level of conscious thought.
No sane person who works with COVID patients would refuse the vaccine. Anyone stupid enough to do so should not be working in medicine. I think that the whole COVID vaccine thing will be raising the average IQ in a lot of fields.
as an anecdotal data point, my wife has a phd in a relevant field. her dissertation involved the lipid nanoparticles used by the pfizer vaccine as a delivery mechanism.
in her words no one really knows how the lipid nanoparticles actually work, and it is much too soon to be forcing this onto the public, and thats just the delivery mechanism. so you have a novel mRNA vaccine, with a novel delivery mechanism, and very little long term safety data. she does not feel like these have been tested to the same standard as other vaccines, we are at the point where if this is mandated for our children we will probably move somewhere they are not.
Vaccines should not be a personal freedom choice. They are a life saving invention, where did we go as a society that this is suddenly up for debate? Did people forget that we eradicated Polio, Tetanus, Hepatitis etc? Where does this sudden influx of people come from that are opposed to this absolute incredible work of science?
> Vaccines should not be a personal freedom choice.
I don't do personal attacks but in your case I'll make an exception: you are a fucking psychopath if you think it's ok to tell people to get a jag for something that is killing literally no one right now!
We're at around 100 deaths per day right now in the UK [0] and those stats don't actually tell you if they died FROM covid or merely had covid 28 days earlier when they died (massive difference!)... completely hides the real data.
In addition, there are on average 450 deaths per day from cancer [1] so where is the big gov. push to eradicate that?
Here are the overall death stats in the UK [2]. COVID is a tiny fraction of it.
Wouldn't this imply that the vaccine is physically harmful to you? There is literally no argument against it if you don't imply that. Do you think it is? I am really interested to discuss this with somebody who isn't a conspiracy theorist, so I'd be happy if you can answer.
> Wouldn't this imply that the vaccine is physically harmful to you?
I have no evidence to say that the vaccine is physically harmful to me, personally, but there are plenty of stories on the web where people in the prime of their health, have been struck down with something after taking it.
However, there is plenty of evidence to say that covid itself is not harmful at all... look at the stats - literally no one is dying!
These jags are also brand new: they're a few years old so there is ZERO data on long-term risks. None! For all we know, in a few years people may start dropping dead with heart conditions.
Now, if covid was as life-threatening to the majority of people as it is being marketed as, then I can potentially see a case where people should get it but the figures do not lie: almost no one is dying from covid.
Remember, this covid jag is a treatment for something that it's unlikely you will succumb to. So, should you get every vaccine going just in case?
Additionally, the gov wants you to keep taking it, over and over again! That will increase your long-term risk (again, zero data on the long-term effects!).
Plus, by giving in and taking it each time you're told, what kind of world are you leaving your children? They're going to have to get a medical procedure to go to the pub ffs!
So, in answer to your question about whether it's harmful... we don't know and the thing is do you really want to risk your health and that of your children for something that has almost zero chance of affecting you?
Edit: Forgot to say, the point of these jags (despite them incorrectly being called vaccines) is only to make you feel better when you catch it. Make no mistake, they DO NOT prevent infection, DO NOT prevent re-infection, DO NOT prevent spreading... so what the hell are they for? I believe that the newest strain that was discovered in South Africa was in someone with the covid jag...
> They are a life saving invention, where did we go as a society that this is suddenly up for debate?
So condoms, another life-saving invention, should also be mandated? Should you lose your job if you don't wear your seat belt? (Wearing a seat belt does save others by preventing you from becoming an out-of-control projectile and hitting others.) Should people be prevented from buying unpasteurized milk if they want it? Should smokers be forced to quit with the threat of losing their job or fines or jail time, especially since their smoke affects others?
> Did people forget that we eradicated Polio, Tetanus, Hepatitis etc?
Those are sterilizing vaccines that survived longer scrutiny than the COVID ones, and the COVID ones are not sterilizing.
To be honest, the lies around the COVID vaccines have me now questioning those supposedly safe vaccines.
> Where does this sudden influx of people come from that are opposed to this absolute incredible work of science?
If they are anything like me, they came because of the lies we were told. Once we figured out they were lies, it was a natural thing to question other things.
And the vaccines are not an incredible work of "science." They are an engineering effort. That sounds a lot like Fauci claiming that people who criticize him are criticizing science, as though he defines what science is.
Your examples are, in my opinion, poorly chosen - the only ones of relevance are the seatbelt and the smoking ones, since those actually can harm others. And in these cases, there have been laws put in place to limit other people's exposure to this danger, like seatbelt driving laws and smoke free areas.
What lies where there? The only point that I saw until now was the correlation of positive tests within 28 days that another commenter pointed out, but I don't know if that's directly a lie. Can you name one that specially bugs you?
I don't see why you refuse to call vaccines a science effort - it is wholly backed by decades of research when you consider the mRNA transport mechanism (and not the payload itself, I agree here).
Lies like telling people they don't need to wear masks at the beginning (or maybe the lie was flipping to saying we did), or the admission that the goalposts were being moved on herd immunity, or the lie that gain of function research was not funded by the NIH. There are plenty of lies. And those are just the ones admitted. Never mind the fact that Fauci and others have stakes in pharma companies.
Regarding those laws, as I alluded to, they don't take away people's livelihoods. And they are actual laws, not edicts by a governor.
The vaccines may have science behind their creation, but engineering always comes into play when you have to actually create something. The science created the theory, but engineering creates implementations. And I don't trust these implementations the same way I might like theory behind a programming concept but not trust implementations. Like in cryptography.
You would need to exert significant physical force upon me to inject a vaccine into me when I am not willing to subject myself to it. As per the universal human right to security of person, I have an equal right to refuse vaccination. You are advocating for the dissolution of universal human rights that arise from physical reality. As a human, I will have to disagree with you.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] thread> "There is no question that mandating a vaccine to 10.3 million healthcare workers is something that should be done by Congress, not a government agency," wrote Doughty.
That's a good point. You can agree that its within the federal authority to mandate vaccines, but it really should be a decision made and explicitly endorsed by elected representatives rather than some agency (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) that I have never heard of until now and whose head is appointed by one person.
[EDIT]
Too often we look at the end results (e.g. will this increase vaccination rates) rather than the means of getting there. You see it on the left and right. If their guy is in power, they want to expand the scope and reach of their office. Everything is a crisis and someone can solve it if they're just given the right permissions.
And this eventually leads to dishonesty and loss of trust. Even news is reported through a utilitarian lens. Many journalists today think they're doing advocacy rather than reporting. They're not assigned topics but talking points. Someone could be the 'tech bad' guy and his stories are nominally about tech but about how big tech is subverting democracy, bad for the environment, you name it.
Could you imagine a news report about how the much touted vaccine efficacy of 95% didn't really pan out? It's true. Everyone was around 6 months ago and remembered the efficacy levels being thrown around. Now people are being gaslit to thinking they didn't hear what they heard and its about hospitalization. All because being honest could hurt the cause. And yes, vaccine efficacy was 95% and yes it does mean what you think it means [0]
/rant
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
CMS is one of the largest government agencies (by budget, >$1T annually).
(To be clear, I agree with you 100%)
Note that while the position is appointed by POTUS, it is a Senate confirmed position - she was approved with a vote of 55-44 [0] (with five R votes).
[0] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...
The elected representatives chose to delegate this power to the person they approved as the head of CMS. What principle would be involved in requiring Congress to execute its powers in a different manner (i.e. by not delegating), simply because one does not like the outcome in this case? Who would decide which powers Congress could delegate and which it had to exercise directly? Has someone already drafted the Amendment to the Constitution which would limit the powers of Congress in this way?
There's no reason in principle for Congress to directly make this decision about requirements placed on CMS contractors and not other aspects of vendor relations handled by CMS. (The narrow issue here is whether CMS can require its contractors to enforce vaccine mandates.)
The courts clearly disagree with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford
If the CMS does it, it is a public health decision. Doing it in Congress makes it a political decision.
IMO, the better route is that the CMS issues the mandate, but that Congress ratifies it. Ie, they have to provide a clear reason why the public health decision should be overruled.
You're acting like its a trivial procedural matter. These people obviously feel very strongly about it since they're under immense pressure everywhere to get it and they still refuse. Or they may have other reservations, but to dismiss that and just have some nameless faceless un-elected organization intrude in their lives in such a meaningful way is really gross
Whether it is a 'trivial' procedural matter simply isn't affected by people's strongly held beliefs
Strongly held beliefs don't exempt you from seat belt laws, from tax rules, or from any other law unless congress doing the thing congress is designed to do allows for it. It shouldn't.
CMS isn't unelected...it is an arm of the executive branch headed by the, elected, president and run by someone confirmed by the elected senate. It is given the authority to make rules in specific areas by the elected congress.
Your entire thread or argument is predicated on a false assumption...
We have required a great number of vaccines for the last 100 years. The coronavirus vaccines are some of the most-tested out there. Anti-vaxxing was a fringe position that nobody took seriously before Covid.
The only reason this virus is remotely political is because we had a demagogue in the president’s office who likes to force people into contrarian positions because it strokes his ego. So if people want to stay home from work because their politics don’t allow them to do the job, that’s not my problem.
"Most-tested" does not imply "best-tested" or even "well-tested." See, for example, how code coverage for tests can be misleading.
We've had to ask you about this more than once before. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'm not a fan of the situation, but you're acting like it's forced sterilization. It's just a vaccine with a very safe profile. For God's sake, all healthcare workers including the cleaning staff have to get flu shots and show their immunizations every year, or they can't work. Even as a college student I had to get a meningitis shot.
The difference is that those examples aren't mandated by the federal government (as far as I know). I think most people are fine with companies and universities requiring people to be vaccinated.
I think given the context that if your under 65 you are more likely to have medical complications driving to the grocery store its a pretty understandable perspective.
Also the mandate has no exception for natural immunityI. It is I had it and no symptoms of it except I couldn't taste anything, given above, I why would I get a vaccine.
Congress often delegates their power to other agencies. It’s an important regulatory function that allows agencies to adapt to a changing world even in a gridlocked legislature.
That's just a backdoor for giving more power to the federal branch. Its like 'interstate commerce' where anything that has interstate implications (pretty much everything) can be influenced by the federal government. What if an anti-abortion president elected someone to this board and told them that no health care provider that accepts medicare or medicaid can offer abortions?
I don't see mandating people to get a vaccine that they don't want as non-political bureaucratic action, especially considering its coming from the president's office. It's mandating a medical treatment. Take a step back and ask under what authority and supervision should we require a government to be mandating a medical treatment.
The difference I see with abortion is that the SCOTUS held in Roe v Wade that women have an affirmative right to an abortion under substantive due process of the 14th amendment. If the government coerced healthcare providers to stop providing abortions, this would be a direct infringement on a right protected by the constitution. Conversely, there is no constitutional right to /not/ get a vaccine. Of course, the demographics of the court has changed, so it's very possible the SC will rule that not getting vaccinated is also a constitutional right conferred by substantive due process.
> Conversely, there is no constitutional right to /not/ get a vaccine
Doesn't it need to be framed as the government having the right to apply a medical treatment to me against my will?
I have a constitutional right to bare arms but presumably the federal government can decry that I do not have the right in certain places. Or is that not an affirmative right.
[EDIT] It appears that is what US v Lopez is about (federal restriction of guns near schools)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
> Doesn't it need to be framed as the government having the right to apply a medical treatment to me against my will?
This will be tested in litigation in cases like OP, but remember, these vaccine mandates are NOT the government forcing you to accept medical treatment. These mandates have been coercing private employers to require vaccination as a condition of employment. This indirection muddies the water and I can't speculate as to what the courts will ultimately decide on.
Thats a problem when the demographics of a ruling body affect rights protected by the Constitution.
Wisely the Constitution also provides remedy for when that gets too out of hand: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I think one area the Constitution missed the boat is that when a politician or someone in delegated power makes a law or rule that infringes on someone’s freedom that person should be charged and punished for treason. I would think that you would see so many fewer laws a much stronger and law abiding Country.
If you don’t agree with those provisions there is a method to change them and too often short cuts are made that are only corrected after the fact in the courts. Take for instance Biden's vaccine mandate. He knew that was unlawful yet he knowingly did it anyhow. There should be a personal consequence to that beyond not being re-elected.
And I don't believe if the precedent is set regarding freedom from vaccinations being a fundamental right. Won't that have to be decided by the higher level courts? I don't think we're at that stage of treason yet, are we? After all, there will be appeals, and I don't know if a district judge should have the power to charge and punish POTUS.
The pollution solution is defending property rights. In the short term, the USA pollution solution is to offshore manufacturing pollution to other countries.
Even that might not be quite the best end result to be looking for (unless you own the jab patents).
Shouldn't we be looking at clinical outcomes of covid patients, or counts of severe covid cases instead?
If we optimized for marriage rate in the world we might end up with a whole lot of unhappy couples and/or broken homes.
More recently, we've also gotten data for many vaccines showing that they're also effective for children and adolescents.
Lastly, another important group is the elderly. Some studies suggest that they respond more poorly to the vaccine and that the protection may last a shorter time. In response, many countries have prioritized the elderly for receiving booster shots (3rd dose).
This is my principal area of concern. If I recall correctly, the studies that were submitted to FDA for approval for young children did not show improvement in hospitalizations or deaths, in fact there was not a single death in any of the groups, rather they relied on showing the jabs successfully produced antibodies (a much lower standard).
Well, it's not surprising that there would be fewer deaths in children. We'd need a much larger study and I expect that this data will become available now that the vaccines are started to be more widely distributed.
> rather they relied on showing the jabs successfully produced antibodies (a much lower standard)
IIRC the study also found that the vaccine was effective at preventing infections.
Strongly agree. Tangentially, I felt this way about net neutrality. It should have been law passed by Congress. Instead, everyone cheered when an unelected executive board passed a net neutrality bill that the public wasn't allowed to read.
And then, everyone had the audacity to be surprised when the FTC undid net neutrality as fast as it did it. There is a reason we have a legislature and not just an executive branch that can do anything it wants.
The net neutrality PR did work though, the FCC was under a lot of pressure . ATT didn't pay all of those marketing firms to fraudulently post thousands of anti-net-neutrality comments for nothing.
Congress has been delegating rule-making authority to the executive branch since before all of us were born. You may not like that, or you may think some amount of delegation is appropriate, but we've passed that point. But this is the reality here, and the functioning of our federal government pretty much has this baked in at this point, for better or worse.
Then, once the cause is understood, the next step would be to figure out an appropriate system that would work, or at least work better, and amend the Constitution to reflect that new system.
The alternative is to just let things continue as they are going, and I don't like that choice. It results in the president becoming more of a ruler and less of an executive. I expect less freedom down that road (and eventually none), and I don't like it.
My take on the questions I posed is this: Yes, it did work, at least adequately, and now it doesn't. What changed? I suspect that it was Roe v Wade. Since then, the right has been trying to get control of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, and the left has been trying to block them. So both are fighting over control of the nomination process, which means the presidency and the Senate. I suspect that that's the cause of the trench warfare in Congress.
If I'm right, then it is in fact ultimately unfixable. Neither side is going to compromise, ever. You can't even fix it by amending the Constitution, because then there's going to be a battle about undoing the amendment.
I'm from a country (UK) where parliament has absolute power, but also where the populace largely trusts the civil service. Health decisions, prosecution decisions, and so on are explicitly devolved from the government so that they don't become politicized. To me, that seems better, rather than asking politicians to intercede in what should essentially be decisions for experts to make.
That's not at all generally true historically, even if you drop the made up specific number and say something like “vast majority", of US civil servants; it is true of some states, localities, or agencies, and reversed for others.
2020 looks like that, but the 2020-2021 election and transition cycle were rather outside of historical norms. [0]
There is some historical imbalance, but then, that people who adhere to the party that consistently demonizes government, government work aside from military and law enforcement, and government workers, aside from military and law enforcement don't tend to choose to work for government as much as people who don't adhere to that party is...somewhat unsurprising.
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W03
I'm referring to the Federal government. I will amend down to 85%!
I think 2020 is more representative:
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W03&cyc...
I'd say the Federal civil service starts at Health and Human Services and below.
The historical chart on my first link shows that 2020 is wildly nonrepresentative.
Unless you think that Trump vs. the present Democratic party is somehow a new stable political alignment.
> I'd say the Federal civil service starts at Health and Human Services and below.
It does not. Department of State and USPS are largely federal civil service, whereas Los Angeles County and the City of New York are entirely not, for instance.
State and the USPS are a little different - State looks outwards, unlike the rest of the agencies, and the USPS is quasi civil service and a bit of a political football. Not only that, but it has a strong local presence across the country.
The rest of the agencies are, unfortunately, politicized and biased.
Edit: Not all the charts in your link show cumulative data.
But, look at the chart for "Party Split, 1990-2022" in the election years - that's when the civil service donates heavily to get "their party" into power: 2012: Dem 69% 2016: Dem 77% 2020: Dem 76%
That chart includes both "Public Officials" and "Civil Servants". The former group is far more balanced, since the Republican/Democratic split is pretty even. If there was a similar chart for just the Civil Servants, it would be a lot more biased.
Yes, although UK Govt ministers tend to retain accountability when things go wrong, at least in the eyes of the media.
They set rules for everything from how many hospitals can be owned by a single entity, to what sorts of qualifications are required for hospital administrators, to what types of medical orders are allowed to be given to patients. Their explicit charter is to ensure Medicare and medicaid patients are cared for and their health is looked after. From that lens, requiring a vaccination that reduces the likelihood that one of those patients is infected with a potentially deadly disease (particularly deadly for those on Medicare, given the demo), is eminently reasonable.
And the administrator is confirmed by congress. If this regulation was about almost anything else, this would be a nothingburger
Suppose an anti-abortion president gets elected and he elects someone as head and tells them that health care providers that accept medicare or medicaid cannot provide abortions. Not making it illegal per-se, but just for the providers that accept medicare or medicaid for any of their services.
You okay with this as well?
This place has become as intellectually low-brow as Twitter and Reddit.
Not comparable. Based on current law, abortion is a Constitutionally-protected right. Based on precedent from the Spanish-flu era, the government has broad public health powers.
All that said, as someone who isn’t a fan of how much power Congress has ceded to the executive through administrative powers (which delegate legislative powers to the executive through rulemaking), I wouldn’t mind seeing those curtailed.
The decision is much more narrow that you've been led to believe.
It specifically addresses state police powers, not federal powers.
It also doesn't mandate vaccination, it allows a small fine to be paid instead.
Also, according to a well known attorney I consulted (who has argued several cases before the Supreme Court) the Jacobson decision has been overturned countless times and is considered an awful ruling, the Healthcare equivalent of Dred Scott.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
Specifically avoided saying that. Stated simply, my point is there is positive precedent to the precursors to vaccine mandates, and reasonable ambiguity to the question per se. There is clear negative precedent for abortion. As such, comparing them is misleading. (Better analogy may be found in gun rights.)
It seems to me like you just don't think medicare or medicaid should be a thing to begin with. I think it's basic sense that if we're paying for medicare and medicaid we should require the healthcare providers receiving our tax dollars to meet some standard level of care, or else we're just wasting our money. We can argue over what that level of care should be, but I don't think it's all that debatable that requiring things like vaccines could fall into that level of care if not having them is particularly risky for patients.
There's no mechanism to enforce this reasoning. It's whether the agency has the power to do it or not. For instance it could be argued that natural immunity is far superior to vaccines, so excluding healthcare workers with natural immunity from working is not about protecting patients.
> It seems to me like you just don't think medicare or medicaid should be a thing to begin with.
???
The mechanism would be the judicial system, and in the case of restricting abortion services, the regulation would probably be subject to strict scrutiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
I'm not sure what you're getting at, Congress gave the agency the power to set guidelines for requirements for caring for medicaid/medicare patients, that's what they do. If a guideline would not actually impact medicaid/medicare patients, then they can't do it and it would rightfully get struck down in court when it is challenged for not falling within their powers. That's quite literally the same mechanism currently being used to challenge their power to require vaccines.
Your point about natural immunity seems reasonable, it doesn't mean requiring vaccines for those without natural immunity wouldn't still make sense though so I don't think it really fits your point. Claiming that the particular way they went about this requirement is bad is different from saying they can't require a vaccine at all. I think your point makes some sense, but it could still be paired with a vaccine requirement making it effectively the same thing.
> ???
I thought what I said was pretty self explanatory. If Medicare and Medicaid are going to be worth it then we have to have some standard level of care that we're paying for - we shouldn't be paying tons of money just for medicare/medicaid patients to receive bad care. Why should my tax dollars to go a healthcare provider who doesn't want to get the vaccine when that money can go to one who will? The medicare/medicaid patients that we're paying for will get better treatment from those healthcare providers who require vaccination, and if better care is not the goal than what is?
Please don't ascribe beliefs or intentions to me that I didn't explicitly state.
> Why should my tax dollars to go a healthcare provider who doesn't want to get the vaccine when that money can go to one who will?
Medicare and Medicaid should be fee for treatment. Why shouldn't I be allowed to choose what provider I want to visit for the same treatment? They can have different covid policies, much like schools do. I don't think it should be a federal issue.
> The medicare/medicaid patients that we're paying for will get better treatment from those healthcare providers who require vaccination, and if better care is not the goal than what is?
You're mistaking treatment for safety protocols. A health care provider can have a certain doctor to nurse ratio or a million other things and they may not all be "optimal" as defined by the powers that be. We should allow people to choose what health care provider is right for them based on their constraints and not restrict options.
Disagree. If I'm footing the bill for that care (as a taxpayer) I expect to have a say in what constitutes minimum quality of care.
And allowing unvaccinated healthcare workers to treat patients is reckless, and falls well below that minimum quality bar.
(I would also accept healthcare workers with natural immunity, assuming we can establish some sort of testable minimum antibody level that confers a similar level of protection as a vaccine.)
You can, by paying for it yourself :P
> You're mistaking treatment for safety protocols. A health care provider can have a certain doctor to nurse ratio or a million other things and they may not all be "optimal" as defined by the powers that be. We should allow people to choose what health care provider is right for them based on their constraints and not restrict options.
I see what you're saying but I think it's an odd distinction, treatment outcomes and safety protocols are clearly linked, why should tax dollars go to treatment provided with substandard safety protocols when the same can be spent for better treatment elsewhere? Functionally it would just end up costing us and the program more over time and lead to worse outcomes. The other issue here is that most patients aren't even going to know enough about the various things you listed to make an informed opinion about them.
It could be argued that we should wait for benevolent space aliens to come and cure it. Just because it could be argued doesn't mean it's a good argument.
Every single study done on the topic shows that natural immunity (not innate immunity) is vastly superior and more durable and more robust than vaccine immunity. Here's a study from the prestigious publication Cell: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...
What are you talking about?
Lots of things could be argued; some things shouldn't be argued without evidence.
During a pandemic, statements that will be interpreted as suggesting that catching the disease beats vaccination fall squarely in that category.
The supreme court ruled that the 14th amendment[0], has somewhere hidden within it a right to privacy. This right to privacy appearently applies exclusively to abortion, as warrentless wiretapping of every US citizen has been determined not to be a constitutional violation.
I find it funny that they can find a right to privacy in the 14th, but give the thumbs up to civil asset forfeiture that directly contradicts the text and is a obvious violation. They seem to make things up as they go along depending on what is politically expedient.
[0]https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
> Women have a constitutional right to get an abortion.
Do they? Where is that written?
EDIT: the vague "life, liberty, or property" clause as interpreted by Roe vs Wade. This is such a blank-cheque it may as well not be in the constitution as in hands all power to the interpretation of the courts.
If you read federalist papers or any of the writings of founders on the constitution. The constitution is a living document that is decided by the courts. It is really hard to have a fruitful debate without people having even basic knowledge on this subject.
That’s how you end up with Russia taking over Odessa due to “national security” reasons.
If it’s a living document it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.
> having even basic knowledge on this subject
That's your opinion. People debate in echo chambers all the time, if that's what you'd prefer.
Forcing care workers to take a medicine against their will is constitutional you say?
All medical procedures should be voluntary, or we go back to the times of lobotomy and forced sterilizations of minorities (and that's not as many decades back as you may think).
> Government can and has jailed and/or fined people for not getting a vaccine.
This means being unvaxed is a something only the rich can afford. Pay fines, and have a good lawyer.
This is the top Google result for “fire in a crowded theater”: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
With firecodes what they are today, a bomb is a more comparable danger to what a fire was 100 yrs ago, anyway.
Be careful about so willingly giving up your right to self-ownership.
You may not ever get it back.
Apply that to other rights like the right to bear arms. If government couldn’t set standards and people could procure any weapon, how does society function? How does air travel even exist with people owning anti aircraft missiles.
That’s why our founders made our constitution a living document with courts interpreting the constitution and balancing individual rights with our collective rights.
The founders were purposefully vague in several areas of the constitution because they absolutely did want circumstances to determine interpretation, however they were not vague at all about delegated and reserved powers. These things are not "living" in a sense of judicial review.
By "living" document, it was intended that the constitution could be modified by an amendment process. There was never a provision for judicial review.
In fact, then entire concept of judicial review arose from Marbury vs Madison [1] where the court claimed this power.
The purpose of the U.S. Constitution, and one of the things that makes it unique in history, is to limit the powers of the government. The founders believed that individual rights were innate (granted by God), not granted by government and certainly not granted by the federal government.
All powers other than those specifically Delegated to the federal government are reserved for the States - the 10th Amendment makes this clear.
It is not the role of the federal government to decide on "greater good" mandates, those powers are very specifically reserved for the states, who are constrained on what they may do by the Constitution and its amendments.
We, as a country, have allowed the federal government to overstep this in many areas. The DEA, for example, only exists because of a very bad interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, which arose from a bad Supreme Court decision (Wikard vs Filburn)[2] about whether or not you were allowed to grow your own wheat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
They are not forced. They can choose to find another job if they don't want it.
a) Many frontline workers have superior natural immunity anyway.
b) We're in a pandemic and this nuclear option ensures we have fewer healthcare workers, not more ("fewer workers to make the curve more impactful!")
c) Not a year ago these were our heros and saviours, and now they're villains for failing to comply. LOL
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Vaccines are safe and effective so I wont get into what conspiracy theories you believe about the COVID-19 vaccine. Most importantly, vaccines have been mandated by the government in different settings for years. I'm sure if you went to college at a public school, you had to certain vaccines. I know I did.
Despite what the media and elected/appointed officials are telling you the SARS-CoV2 vaccine is not 100% safe[1] or effective[2]. The authority to mandate vaccines resides with states not the federal government. The SCOTUS has upheld this authority in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. The federal government has absolutely zero authority to mandate vaccination in any capacity.
Yes, I did get vaccinations that were mandated by my state to attend public school. All of them were for diseases that are much more destructive and deadly than SARS-CoV2. In my case the vaccines required by my state were diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Who the fuck's been saying either of those things? None of the mainstream sources I've seen, certainly. Usually, for the efficacy angle, they're emphasizing that it's not 100% effective, and that's part of why it's important that more people get vaccinated and that vaccinated people continue to take precautions.
They are not forced to take the medicine. They are given an choice to take the vaccine or find another job. If they refused to take the vaccine, that is their choice, period. They cannot claimed they are being forced because they are given an choice in the first place. They are given a free will with their decision. Thousands of Thousands people screeching for being forced when they are given a choice. Society don’t have to conform to those people who want to endanger their people and their livelihood.
The government can’t violate your right to free speech. They also can’t “ask” a private company to censor you as it effectively the same thing.
Telling someone “its your choice but if you don’t do it you’ll lose your livelihood” is not a choice at all.
The ability of the government to establish vaccination requirements is long established. It's only becoming a hot topic now because anti-science folks have been programmed to fear a safe and effective vaccine.
I'm talking about 'well-established' in that it's been happening for 200+ years. The conservative right-wing theocratic extremists that trump appointed will destroy our judicial norms for the next 50 years but that doesn't make them right.
The difference is you flipped the switch and decided to turn up to work without clothes. You decided to radically change your behavior and actions in the workplace. This will obviously have consequences due to your unsightly naked body offending co-workers.
When someone doesn't flip any switch, but continues to work exactly as they did before, they have not done anything you can label a "choice with harsh consequences".
Unvaccinated people are not suddenly shedding and dangerous, in the way a naked person is shedding pubic hairs everywhere.
>Unvaccinated people are not suddenly shedding and dangerous, in the way a naked person is shedding pubic hairs everywhere.
Unvaccinated people are inherently dangerous. The change is that we now have the ability for them to become vaccinated people who aren't nearly as dangerous to their clients.
In June 2020, we had no choice but to have unvaccinated health care workers. Today, we do.
They are not dangerous. A person who has access to sharp knives but is currently not holding a knife, is no more dangerous than someone who does not have access to knives.
But even that analogy doesn't fit, since vaccinated people can certainly still get sick and transmit the virus.
Besides, I am not restricting my position in this debate to health care workers. I am talking about anyone with a job, who is now required to get vaccinated. That's what happened where I live (Australia). Everyone in my state from barristers, to builders, office workers, truck drivers... literally every professional who isn't working from home, is required to get the vaccine or lose their job.
Many are pissed off with the expanding scope of mandates.
I can understand the requirement for health workers to be vaccinated. But even then, they should have the option to be tested regularly instead.
This is what happens... incremental laws expand and eliminate choice. Suddenly you live in a world where you must get jabbed every 6 months, and repeatedly prove your vaccine status to everyone every day. Tagged, tracked and validated for walking around doing normal things is not a world we should be encouraging, even in pandemic times. If we must disagree on that point, then fine, we disagree.
Vaccinated people can get sick and transmit the virus, true, but it's much less likely that they will. People with STIs can also transmit the virus, so we wear condoms to make the risk of transmission substantially less. If your sexual partner is unwilling to wear a condom or unwilling to have sex with you if you wear one, you can just choose to not have sex with them and the risk of transmission goes to nothing. That choice doesn't exist with work. If my co-worker chooses to remain a massive public health risk, my chances of catching COVID-19 go up quite a bit. I can't choose to just not be around you and the rest of anti-vaxxers. Not to mention there are people who have legitimate medical reasons who are unable to get vaccinated who are put at substantially higher risk by being forced to be around conspiracy theory anti-vaxxers.
Interesting line of argument. So, if my boss says: "have sex with me or lose your job", is that freedom of choice or blackmail?
Don't pollute comparisons with situations that have other considerations
You are not an island. You live in a society, a community of people that requires individuals to give up some personal liberties for the good of the whole. Those who don't like that should go move to an isolated island where their harm to others can be limited.
CMS only controls this for patients covered by Medicaid/Medicare. It can set the tone for the entire industry, but does not solely control the industry. Typically, they create influence by setting/rejecting Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement standards. Since enough patients are covered by CMS, it tends to be easier for hospitals to broadly adopt the policies.
Your example is a covered procedure, some of which is defined by the CMS, but much of it is defined by federal statute that dictates what classes of procedure are covered by medicaid/medicare. To go to your example specifically, federal statute ALREADY limits medicaid abortion coverage to abortions arising from rape, incest, or that put the health of the mother at risk. 16 states go beyond that and cover abortion in more cases, but they pay for that with their own money (which is also allowed statutorily). So in your case, what the new CMS head was declaring is unlawful on its face, as this is something that congress has specifically addressed.
Assuming it is: I think policy measures like that should be subject to medical needs. I think there's a clear medical need to require COVID vaccinations for healthcare workers, but banning abortions doesn't pass that test.
And hell, didn't the Trump administration actually do this, though maybe through different means? Withholding federal funding from providers who offer abortions?
Congress does not delegate lawmaking, Congress delegates the execution of its powers to the Executive branch. This is how the country has functioned since the beginning, for it would be impractical for it to work otherwise.
Say more: delegation will happen at some level, by definition. In military matters, every step or shot a soldier takes is a decision that has been delegated through a chain of command from Congress. Since Congress is not ever going to be in a position to execute every decision for every individual over which Congress has power, Congress inevitably will delegate the execution of its powers. It has always been this way, and will be this way as long as we have a republic.
That's the Constitution, not Congress. Regulation, as well, is not execution. Thomas's concurrence on Whitman v. American Trucking Ass’ns signals where things might go.
This is an opinion that was not widely held for most of the last 100 years or so.
> Thomas's concurrence on Whitman v. American Trucking Ass’ns signals where things might go.
Definitely agree that our legal regime looks headed for major changes. I consider it likely that SCOTUS will reverse itself on a set of major principles, creating uncertainty for citizens and businesses until a new equilibrium is reached.
Most of our other problems are a consequence of that.
This is from someone who chose freely to get the vaccine. Even at my own peril I support other’s freedom to choose.
something, something, consequences.
what about all the WFH people mandated into vaccines? how does it impact that employer?
To a significant degree.
> what about all the WFH people mandated into vaccines?
This case wasn't about them.
It significantly reduces the likelihood that you spread it to your coworkers (and, perhaps more importantly, to the old and sick people that healthcare workers tend to serve). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...
> what about all the WFH people mandated into vaccines? how does it impact that employer?
Obviously vaccine requirements for remote workers don't make a ton of sense in principle, but in practice I worry that an exemption for remote employees would result in a lot of people getting mis-coded (intentionally or otherwise) as remote and ultimately showing up at work unvaccinated and putting vulnerable people at risk.
This is, as far as I can see, the most directly analogous situation. Those who support vaccine mandates, how do you feel about this situation? (And note that this was just an "unofficial" employee mandate - there was no government entity involved.)
I think the two situations are comparable in some ways, and not in others. The "have to do something medical in order to keep your job" part is one of the ways it's comparable. The "bodily autonomy" is another. It's different in that it's not a government mandate. It's different in how it affects others.
So: Did you actually want to engage, or did you just want to give a plausible dismissal?
Also, this is a minor point but illegal abortions are many orders of magnitude more risky than COVID vaccines.
I strongly oppose broad-reaching government-imposed vaccine mandates, but I strongly support a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers specifically. The US government has already taken on the responsibility for setting employment eligibility standards for healthcare workers, and it makes sense for being vaccinated to be one of those criteria.
If expect there are certain Catholic organizations who would fire you if you admitted to having had an abortion.
... Which goes to the court ruling that's the topic of the article: Congress has the power to decide these issues.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Most of the argument is whether this requirement is in the "employee must wash hands before surgery" category, which is about the patients' right to be safe not the employee's (in theory the patients didn't "choose" to be there).
The people complaining are reacting as if the ruling sounds like "male high school teachers get vasectomies, to keep teenage pregnancies down", because the effects are "permanent, * upto six months" and directly to your body without it being an on-the-job requirement.
The part that makes me leery is that these sort of "are your vaccines upto-date" checklists have always existed, but this time it is controversial (or maybe it was for MMR - but it wasn't news).
this is also the first time where the vaccine industry and the broader public health space have been put under this kind of scrutiny and the combination of politicization, outright lies and deception over masks and policy in both directions and the overall visibility of the sausage making process happens to be occurring alongside a decline of trust in institutional expertise. when most people got their tetanus shots, the faces of the medical profession were not acting as explicitly political agents.
Nearly every common-sense measure implemented during this pandemic has been derided by the right as some sort of unacceptable infringement on individual rights.
Not saying those in power have gotten it all right 100% of the time; I'm especially disappointed with the mask fiasco you mention, but... c'mon. Doctors are not acting as "political agents" in the vast majority of situations that have caused the US's pandemic response to be as lacking as it's been.
It's not common sense if a plurality of people don't agree with it. Denying children in-person schooling for a year wasn't "common sense", cancelling elective procedures like cancer screenings wasn't "common sense", forcing people to wear masks outdoors wasn't "common sense", and so on. Lots of people were denied rights in these cases and would consider those measures unacceptable.
It is? By Easter right? With what other coronavirus have we ever reached herd immunity?
Intentionally coughing on someone is a prosecutable crime in many parts of the world --- What do you think makes it a crime?
Why not? if the cost & benefit ratio is worth it, maybe we should. The same for any other diseases you can think of. If the answer is yes, then there are no reason for any of us to refuse unless we have good excuses.
Does that not include the unborn?
And would you be comfortable having a pediatrician who wasn't inoculated for diphtheria knowing that an infection could be fatal for your baby?
I can't speak for the person you're talking to, but those old vaccines are actual vaccines, unlike the recent mRNA injections, which are so different from what we typically think of as vaccines that the CDC had to change its definition of the word "vaccine" to remove the notion that a vaccine provides protection from a disease.
So of course not. The old diseases were serious threats, and the old vaccines were actual vaccines. Not similar to the current situation, where the virus is a negligible threat to all people who are not elderly or suffering from serious disease already, and the injection being proffered does not prevent a person from contracting or transmitting the virus.
People very broadly give power to the CDC that I don't think they have.
Do you know that the two federal mandates were issued by CMS and by OSHA, two completely different organizations from the CDC?
BTW, the law as written gives very broad powers to OSHA and other agencies. This is controversial mainly because one political side in the country is anti vaccine right now.
My point still stands. Vaccine enforcement and mandates was not even considered as under their purview. It's quite hair-splitting to say "there's nothing that says they _can't start enforcing vaccine mandates_."
Even if the law as written allowed it? Since the OSHA act and Social security acts that give OSHA and CMS regulatory authority passed, the USA has never faced a deadly virus pandemic that could be combated with a vaccine.
If Congress specifically wrote the law to allow flexibility for new situations it doesn’t make sense to me to argue that because the situation didn’t arise in the 20th century that the authority and law has lost its power.
What I'm not seeing is engagement with the actual text of the statutes that Congress already wrote and put on the books. For instance, the OSHA Act specifically gave OSHA power to regulate "new hazards".
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2019-title29/html... "1) The Secretary shall provide, without regard to the requirements of chapter 5 of title 5, for an emergency temporary standard to take immediate effect upon publication in the Federal Register if he determines (A) that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards, and (B) that such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger."
Similarly the Social Security act already gave broad power to issue regulations. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1395hh# "such regulations as may be necessary to carry out the administration of the insurance programs under this subchapter" "No rule, requirement, or other statement of policy (other than a national coverage determination) that establishes or changes a substantive legal standard governing the scope of benefits, the payment for services, or the eligibility of individuals, entities, or organizations to furnish or receive services or benefits under this subchapter shall take effect unless it is promulgated by the Secretary by regulation under paragraph (1)."
the Act clearly envisions the secretary having authority to change standards for benefits, payment for services, and eligibility. There's no limitation saying that eligibility criteria can be based on other safety measures, but not vaccines.
EDIT: and SCOTUS precedent interpreting this language in the past was clear about the scope of authority it gave. See page 34 of the PDF here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dGiMcVAxfziaoecQtd40-nERZr_...
A mandate for vaccinating healthcare seems a lot closer to existing regulations that the law was designed to allow. It’s clearly a health and safety regulation just like the dozens of previous health regulations regulating quarantine, mask wearing, sanitation, safe handling of items, etc.
The reason congress doesn’t reserve this power is because in our system congress can’t react quickly or sometimes at all. It has to pass laws giving up this type of authority to the executive branch because it knows its own processes don’t work quickly or efficiently enough.
Congress did give itself instead the authority to veto regulations it doesn’t like, using the Congressional Review Act. It used to give itself even stronger authority using the one-house legislative veto, but the Supreme Court struck that down. < https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...>
Yes, but at some point there must be a limit to how much power they can delegate. If Congress created a new Super-Congress that it granted all the powers of Congress, I would contend that would be unconstitutional. It clearly goes against the founding principles of having three branches of government. That would be akin to the government creating a fourth branch without amending the constitution.
Amending the constitution is a process that is clearly defined by the constitution. If that process isn't needed to create a fourth branch of government, a change that changes the core of the constitution, what would it ever be needed for and why would they have included it?
If we are going to talk about what's the right answer from a position of "if the court says it that's how it goes" then I can assume you're happy with this court decision?
Still, I'm happy that we're not breaking the rules for the convenience of getting an outcome I'd like better.
https://usarmybasic.com/about-the-army/army-shots
Do you mean like "Efficacy of Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine slips to 84% after six months, data show" (https://www.statnews.com/2021/07/28/efficacy-of-pfizer-biont...) or "Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy: What Do the Numbers Really Mean?" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-vaccine-efficacy-what-...)? Or did you have something else in mind?
I thought this was pretty well-discussed as VRBPAC/ACIP began to review the data guiding their third dose/booster recommendations but maybe I've misunderstood.
It didn’t pan out because of Delta, a way more infectious variant that became common well after the 95% figure was determined.
And it’s fully accurate to say that despite Delta, the vaccines are effective at preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death. I think that’s a very good thing!
So that "95%" figure was a lie to begin with, because those who touted it knew exactly what was going to happen. Viruses evade, and any non-sterilizing vaccine will be evaded by a virus. This is how you get delta, this is how you get omicron (which, by the way, was first found in fully vaccinated individuals and likely created through this evolutionary pressure).
Thanks
If the vaccines don't work, why do people in the real world die much, much less often from covid once they are vaccinated?
If you are so sure an immune-evading variant will emerge, why hasn’t one? (There is no evidence at all that omicron evades the vaccines).
Vaccine evasion is happening, and it doesn't matter whether it's delta or omicron. Would Pfizer pay for a study that proves their vaccines are worthless? Would Fauci, who hands down government money in the form of grants, give a grant for a study that would demolish the pharma companies that he has his money tied to?
The vaccines obviously have SOME efficacy, but just enough to make a product that sells. If someone sold you a new car, and didn't tell you it would break down 6 months down the road, wouldn't you be angry? They polished the car just enough for you to buy, without telling you what lurked in the shadows the entire time.
Virologists knew the roll-out of a non-sterilizing vaccine would end in the scenario we currently have. Period.
Also the reason Pfizer or other people pay for studies that may disprove their drugs is because they actually don’t know whether the drugs work or not! They are paying to find out. Studies fail all the time. You’ve picked one of the most successful studies and treatments of all time to show the system is rigged. Look at all the ones that didn’t work. Why doesn’t Merck, the largest pharma company, have a vaccine? If it’s so easy to fabricate the data, why didn’t they? Why didn’t their virologists lie? Is Merck the only honest pharma company?
On what basis? It's proved impossible so far to make a strongly efficacious flu vaccine because of constantly shifting variants. But on the other hand, there are many examples of successful vaccines that have never had an efficacy-killing variant emerge (polio, smallpox, chicken pox). How would anyone who has taken a biology class know a priori whether COVID-19 would be a flu or a polio?
Thanks!
The initial studies on vaccine efficacy were designed to study efficacy at preventing serious illness, not transmission. So it was not known at the time how effective the vaccines would be on that dimension. To answer these questions requires novel research, it is not settled, freshmen biology knowledge.
Which is it?
Maybe social utilitarianism is all there is?
Maybe the rest is just being left alone. Formal demands by churches their flock act as social missionaries and stewards to save others souls being LARPed in a secular world.
Why do I have to care about inside these machines and not just the machines (organic or synthetic)?
There are separate needs due to physics that we cannot let our imaginations of unfettered freedom disabuse us of.
That will lead to mistrust; if moral relativism is fine for anti-vaxxers, why not open hostility? My biology cannot control itself in all situations.
We don’t let a chainsaw wielding psycho live in his own world. That’s based on real world observation of the outcomes.
How is viral transmission that can be measured physically, even though it requires some specific tools, be considered any less violent towards others than a chainsaw wielding knob? Our evidence comes from the same observable space as our evidence a chainsaw wielding knob is unsafe.
Philosophical wankery does not change the physical truth.
That's a facile statement. I'd have to bait an HN into playing devil's advocate just to get an opposing view.
What are the "Zig and Rust" of protecting democracy in a time of crisis? Or maybe more realistically-- if we want a "Zig and Rust" for making democracy "memory safe," what are the sources to start with? (Note: I'll filter any citations that rely on invisible hands or, "let's start by decentralizing all the thingies")
Jacobson v. Massachusetts[1] established that it is within the State's power to mandate vaccinations, so shouldn't this be up to individual states? I'm also pro- nationwide mandatory vaccinations, but Congress also doesn't seem to be the right way to do it.
1: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/
Odd, the fact that you have never heard about the CMS has no bearing on whether it has the authority to issue a vaccine mandate
This is not true at all. Media has been talking openly about "waning immunity" and "declining effectiveness" all along.
There’s a reason, for example, why we don’t let the market or public opinion dictate the efficiency or safety of drugs.
I remember that too, and I think its needed context.
Are you aware that Federal regulatory agencies are a result of Congress delegating their power, mostly to the executive branch? Congress has already delegated their authority…
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is... that meant to be a bad thing? Yes, judicial branch should not be directly accountable to voters. In fact, as a Canadian, I find the idea of electing judges to be so thoroughly strange that it almost defies belief. Why the hell would you want your judicial branch to be "democratic", as in directly and immediately beholden to the whims of the mob? It should be behind layers of indirection, only generally accountable to the voters, and with a long lag to boot.
But yes, if you have garbage politicians they will at some point start appointing garbage judges, garbage crown attorneys, etc. and the system breaks down. So, like, get better politicians (by which I really mean become better voters).
As a Briton I agree. It's also why I'm quite sceptical of the concrete benefits of a directly elected House of Lords and the replacement of the monarchy with a presidential system which are popular ideas in some political circles. I'm no fan ideologically of the trappings of a landed gentry and there's plenty of room for heavy reforms there but having a strictly apolitical head of state and a semi-technocratic oversight body has its advantages. Democracy isn't necessarily measured by the amount of government positions which are directly or indirectly elected - there's more nuances than that.
We have unelected officials who are making decisions against the will of the people. The entire system is too large for any person to affect change. That is why we see “crises;” they allow people to focus the group onto a crisis. In normal times, the entire industry reverts to how can they increase their size..
"We have unelected officials who are making decisions against the will of the people."
I didn't vote for the guys who made the decision to buy the F35, who audited my tax return, or who wrote the manual on uniform traffic control devices (and among all of these I have the most beef with them). But I voted for and against their bosses. I really really don't want my local mail carrier being an elected position, I and you and they have better things to do.
this country isn't a direct democracy, lets not act like it should be just when we disagree with the actions of those elected. These arguments are simply asinine because you know damn well this isn't how things work or were meant to work. You don't like the rule written by one 'unelected' lawyer in the executive branch so you are happy with it being overturned by another 'unelected' lawyer in the judicial branch...
define 'made the decision'. Who made the decision by your estiamtion? was it the president who directed aides to implement a vaccine mandate? was it the aid who decided it was most appropriate to do through CMS? was it the head of CMS who directed individuals in his organization? Was it the person who actually fired up microsoft word and WROTE the text? The person who published the final rule?
Your argument is a straw man to try and give the veneer of a high minded process complaint to something you simply disagree with on substance. It is characteristic of certain groups and it is unfortunately rarely actively critiqued. It has become common place and is fundamentally disruptive to productive discourse.
Also, they explicitly said that Congress should do it, as our elected representatives. That's basically putting the authority where it belongs, if it exists. That's not about preventing government from doing anything.
And what's wrong with dismantling the administrative state? Many industries are already over-regulated because there are so many agencies, so many rules, and often, those rules conflict. The administrative state is a hindrance to progress and innovation because it keeps new players from entering the field.
Why do you think that "dismantling" it will lead to ruin?
I don’t think that’s what you intended, but thank you!
Not sure what you’re complaining about. You seem to both want more and less democracy at the same time. Just because the president is elected doesn’t make him a king, and doesn’t make anything he does democratic.
If you don't like the law, get Congress to change it.
2. Every temporary injunction issued in the litigation surrounding the wall and Muslim ban was conducted with the Democratic version of this same strategy.
This is the game. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. We will learn the law in time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No people aren’t being rounded up and stuck with needles against their will. Getting fired from a job is a big deal. Not being able to pay bills or buy food or care for a family, no health insurance, that’s a big deal. Surely you’re bright enough to distinguish between “forced full stop” or “forced and in extremely dire financial straits.”
What if I told you there was a new federal mandate that requires you to get a tattoo of my choosing on your forehead. If you don’t, you lose your job.
Doesn’t seem reasonable.
If your job requires interacting with other people, then your not being vaccinated directly risks the health and life of those people. You don't get to say "it's my choice to intentionally risk harm to others" and then say "it's illegal to stop me from doing that".
For example, no one is required to be licensed as a doctor, but you don't get to do surgery on people if you aren't licensed.
The law doesn't prevent people from being alcoholics, but you don't get to be a drunk bus driver.
Another enviable feature of European democracies is that the group that receives the most votes ends up being the group in power.
Plenty to dislike as well, but it's always a compromise.
Also, 'personal freedom' comments are ... pretty ironic today of all days. "Tell me you're a dude without writing you're a dude".
In many parts of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, hesitancy, misinformation on social media, and lack of adequate institutions is now more of a hindrance than getting shipments.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/world/africa/coranavirus-...
The vast majority of doctors get themselves vaccinated, whereas a large portion of nurses only get vaccinated as needed legally.
These people were considered heroes last year (and overwhelmingly exposed to this virus while everyone else stayed at home). Now their judgment is in question because they won't follow the herd, with all of their medical experience/expertise being rejected or discredited. The inconsistency is a work of art.
Everyone should read this: https://www.amazon.com/Rape-Mind-Psychology-Menticide-Brainw... — you will find an alarming number of parallels to our current situation.
If you are suggesting that vaccination stops transmission, you're wrong. Might want to be explicit about that, dubiously named green account.
Most footsoldiers who die in a war are considered heroes, and people can consider them that without holding in their heads at the same time the idea those soldiers would have made good generals.
It's not a "hasty generalization."
> Now their judgment is in question
> These people = doctors, nurses, etc (medical professionals).
Those professions were considered heroic, not every single person individually. Yes, many that served those positions well were individually celebrated too. The ones that didn't, and there were plenty, had their judgment heavily questioned, even last year.
Drawing conclusions about an individual based on a broad category they happen to fall into is "hasty generalization", by the book.
Are these people performing treatments on patients that they do not believe work?
The mind boggles.
Do you think that medicine is a nothing or all kind of thing? DO you believe that those who do not trust big companies that have paid millions in criminal fines, reject the rest of medicine?
You are simply not Supposed to "believe" in science that is reedit tier thinking, Science is a process and in such process mistrusting leaky vaccines that reduce T cells amounts is ok. Medical Science is not monolithic.
Or... the people who know the most about the tradeoffs and benefits of this particular vaccine have done a cost/benefit analysis and rejected it? I'd be curious to see if they're rejecting this particular (experimental, rushed, based-on-unproven-mRNA technology) vaccine but not, say, the mumps or rubella vaccines.
And, of course, others who are also in that better position evaluate the evidence differently.
One could draw two conclusions from this: "People are idiots", or "the evidence is not as clear-cut as we're being told".
(Edit: although it is plausible that this is due to some bias in the statistics - e.g. medical workers are expected to be working age adults (who are statistically more likely to be vaccinated anyway), and the general population is obviously a wider range)
So does this suggest that those in the know are more likely to be vaccinated? Or that those in the know are taking a wait-and-see approach?
My... estimate? Gut feel? I do not have data... is that medical workers are at least no less likely than others of their same age group to get vaccinated. They may well be more likely to get vaccinated.
But there are holdouts by the thousands, some of whom are willing to quit their high-paying jobs in order to avoid the vaccine. I don't think they're all just stubborn idiots. I think that at least many of them have done their own risk assessment, and decided that it wasn't worth it.
On the other hand, others have gotten vaccinated, by the tens or hundreds of thousands, and they aren't all idiots or sheep, either.
So... my read of the behavior of the people in the field is that the evidence leads toward the vaccines being worth it, but it's not as clear-cut as the media tells us. But I'm trying to use psychology to judge a matter of medical technology, and who knows if that approach is even halfway valid...
For thousands of years, privileged citizens of empires have gotten more rights and better treatment than non-citizens and foreigners. Some humans are just born into a position where they don't need to fear for their life or fight to survive. This is true even in the US; all over the country, in the same square mile, you will find people starving, and people throwing away good food; people rejecting a vaccine just to exercise their personal power, and people waiting 8 hours outside in freezing cold to get one. Our societies seem destined for injustice.
Also, the virus does care about the things you mention, insofar as they affect infection vectors i.e. If you don't have the power to avoid situations that put you at risk.
If you mean the virus is literally not stopped by legislation, nor is it literally sentient; who made such a claim? How is the insentient nature of the virus anything but an irrelevant tangent?
You can bring a horse to water, but I'll have to force it out for you. The virus is an unstoppable force of nature. It exists in cats, dogs, ferrets, fruit bats, gorillas, hamsters, minks, sea otters, pumas, snow leopards, tigers, hyenas, tree shrews and whitetail deer. It exists in all continents. Your pen and cheque are temporary counter-measures at best.
I have relatives who work in healthcare and refuse to get the vaccine. They're at risk of losing their jobs because regardless of external pressure, the hospital employing them is incentivized to let them go by the patients. They're a hospital focused on physical therapy, which is does as much elective business by volume as prescribed... And very few patients are willing to work with a physical therapist who isn't vaccinated, so they're simply losing business as word-of-mouth gets around that they don't require vaccines and patients sign up for their PT regiments with other hospitals in the region.
By the same token that the government (absent a law from Congress) perhaps can't force organizations to employ vaccinated staff, the government may have no say if an individual employee is fired because an organization requires vaccinated staff of their own accord.
This would be a good time for Congress to show some leadership and lay down some legal guidelines.
Better to wait for the updated booster before forcing more people to take it.
I mean this would be a good time for Congress to show leadership in general. As in, make a decision. Really, any decision that shows some reasoning behind it. Entirely too many people in the service of legislature are more worried about their electability than doing a good job. There's a reason that branch has, on average, a mid-teens approval rating most of the time.
Couple the above with with a ban on advertising pharmaceuticals and we would see a 50% reduction in per capita health care spend almost overnight.
I’m all for the libertarian solution here: just charge people who refuse to get vaxxed more in premiums to fund their future more expensive Covid treatments. It should not be considered a preexisting condition. This would extend to group plans, except since the risk is all pooled, it would have to be for workplaces that don't mandate the vaccine. And areas of the country that have low vaccination rates should necessarily have higher insurance rates given that vaccines require mass adoption to be effective.
And what about other choices that impact emergency care? Obesity related illness and injuries, smoking and other cancer-inducing habits, dangerous activities such as motor sports and rock climbing, workplace injuries without appropriate PPE, auto accidents without helmets and seat belts, etc.
And who is it that gets to be the moral arbiter of what is acceptable? To me, it seems like whoever is in power. What happens when “the other side” from your perspective wins an election cycle?
It literally gives government moral authority over who deserves care and who doesn't. "Universal" healthcare, as long as you're part of the universe that does exactly what the government tells you to do.
You should be allowed to have whatever private health care or sharing, etc you want, while having some basic amount of care commonly available. There will always be limits. Rich people can afford to hire their own private doctor and nurses. We can't realistically afford that for every individual.
And we have already identified these things really. From preventative care and reproductive health options which can be found free of charge, to things like EMTALA granting emergency care to everyone.
Identify the things which are fundamental and provide those to everyone, and allow the upper echelons and unique needs to operate in free market.
Or, for that matter, to other groups of people with an "illness that could have been prevented by a widely and freely available measure"?
A few spring to mind immediately – obesity first and foremost.
In broad terms, I agree with your approach: incentives at the personal level. Bottom-up. But in many countries (mine included, in EU), "health insurance" is really just a tax. There's no connection between your health & behaviour, and the "insurance" cost or fulfillment. So what you propose would essentially amount to privatizing health care, or at least turning it from an income tax into real insurance.
Even without vaccines, that means nearly half of Americans already have natural immunity which is vastly superior to vaccine immunity.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
No- that many have had a positive test or other diagnosis confirming covid.
There were plenty of non-hospitalized, non-diagnosed cases before the tests existed. And plenty of people have had it and never saw a reason to get a test to confirm it.
I'd say we're far above that estimated number.
...but even if you full blown covid, there is no exemption from the vaccine requirement - that's one of the main arguments of many health workers.
If you're not vaccinated or have natural immunity, there's likely zero increased reason for personal concern.
We require other vaccines.
There is plenty of room for dissent, but it stops being “dissent” when it is simply denying reality.
Ah yes of course, when the common view gets the label of “reality” dissent is no longer “dissent.” /s
If only everyone could see the line in the same place, but well if that were the case I don’t suppose there’d be any dissent at all.
I mean that is a common refrain among the various anti-basic science groups, but I'm curious if that is the view you take
You would be very hard pressed to find a self respecting scientist who calls any of their work “objective fact.” There are several ways to display views that are “anti-basic science,” and you are displaying one of them.
But to try and wrangle your question into what I think it was intending (though severely misled such that I needed the above preamble): Do I believe established high probability scientific consensus and recommendations can be discarded or disagreed with as mere opinion? Absolutely not. I am not at all “anti-basic science” in the way that you think I am. I think it’s quite possible to accept the scientific consensus on COVID as it exists so far and still argue currently against mandatory vaccinations in different settings.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/flu-vaccine-requir...
In other words most healthcare workers share the same demographics as those who currently have low uptake on the vaccine.
The lower tiers of nurse only require 2 years, IIRC, and I think those are more like technical programs than typical liberal-arts-informed degrees. Then there's the clerks, the front-desk people (to include the ones at the "front desk" of each floor, department, or section of the hospital, plus the ones at the actual main entrance[s]) the cleaning and housekeeping staff (someone has to go around restocking supplies and such), the entire billing department, the people who come around to bug sick people about their insurance details, the security guards (hospitals have lots of them), and so on.
Or maybe they are aware of drugs that received authorization in the past and that the same companies that are making bank of the vaccines, don't have the best history with being honest and transparent.
Not surprised by this ruling at all.
Just wanted to add this comment from the middle of this discussion.
There is so much irrationality these days that we need to have a solid foundation for our decision making and not based on the whims of the panicked masses.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sur...
Just because someone works in Medicine doesn't mean they are intelligent.
Things like vaccines also threaten the status of people who use the virus in order to extract money from their audiences, like megachurch preachers and snake oil salesmen. Some people got really wealthy off Ivermectin and HCQ prescriptions during this whole thing.
To anyone paying attention it's obvious that this is not the case. Everyone should not get vaccinated, some folks can't get the vaccine. And not it's not safe and effective for everyone, some have had a bad reaction.
It would be one thing if the government realized this and placed reasonable exceptions for those who either can't get it or don't need to because they have natural immunity or immunity through monoclonal antibodies. But they don't and they continue to push this one way of getting immunity.
And that's where the distrust forms. More and more it seems that the government doesn't actually give a damn about these edge cases, all they want to do is check the box that says you have been vaccinated.
So that's not the case with all doctors.
Then again, I'm fit, healthy, great diet, low stress, eat well, lots of sunlight. Covid poses less risk to me than driving, my kids it doesn't rise to the level of conscious thought.
Covid's over here.
Their jobs are being threatened too, and are more likely to have large debt from school and to be the primary breadwinner of their family than nurses.
Nurses just have more realistic freedom to say no.
They should lose their medical license for spreading such utter lies.
in her words no one really knows how the lipid nanoparticles actually work, and it is much too soon to be forcing this onto the public, and thats just the delivery mechanism. so you have a novel mRNA vaccine, with a novel delivery mechanism, and very little long term safety data. she does not feel like these have been tested to the same standard as other vaccines, we are at the point where if this is mandated for our children we will probably move somewhere they are not.
This is an international forum.
I don't do personal attacks but in your case I'll make an exception: you are a fucking psychopath if you think it's ok to tell people to get a jag for something that is killing literally no one right now!
We're at around 100 deaths per day right now in the UK [0] and those stats don't actually tell you if they died FROM covid or merely had covid 28 days earlier when they died (massive difference!)... completely hides the real data.
In addition, there are on average 450 deaths per day from cancer [1] so where is the big gov. push to eradicate that?
Here are the overall death stats in the UK [2]. COVID is a tiny fraction of it.
[0] - https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=over... [1] - https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-... [2] - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
I have no evidence to say that the vaccine is physically harmful to me, personally, but there are plenty of stories on the web where people in the prime of their health, have been struck down with something after taking it.
However, there is plenty of evidence to say that covid itself is not harmful at all... look at the stats - literally no one is dying!
These jags are also brand new: they're a few years old so there is ZERO data on long-term risks. None! For all we know, in a few years people may start dropping dead with heart conditions.
Now, if covid was as life-threatening to the majority of people as it is being marketed as, then I can potentially see a case where people should get it but the figures do not lie: almost no one is dying from covid.
Remember, this covid jag is a treatment for something that it's unlikely you will succumb to. So, should you get every vaccine going just in case?
Additionally, the gov wants you to keep taking it, over and over again! That will increase your long-term risk (again, zero data on the long-term effects!).
Plus, by giving in and taking it each time you're told, what kind of world are you leaving your children? They're going to have to get a medical procedure to go to the pub ffs!
So, in answer to your question about whether it's harmful... we don't know and the thing is do you really want to risk your health and that of your children for something that has almost zero chance of affecting you?
Edit: Forgot to say, the point of these jags (despite them incorrectly being called vaccines) is only to make you feel better when you catch it. Make no mistake, they DO NOT prevent infection, DO NOT prevent re-infection, DO NOT prevent spreading... so what the hell are they for? I believe that the newest strain that was discovered in South Africa was in someone with the covid jag...
So condoms, another life-saving invention, should also be mandated? Should you lose your job if you don't wear your seat belt? (Wearing a seat belt does save others by preventing you from becoming an out-of-control projectile and hitting others.) Should people be prevented from buying unpasteurized milk if they want it? Should smokers be forced to quit with the threat of losing their job or fines or jail time, especially since their smoke affects others?
> Did people forget that we eradicated Polio, Tetanus, Hepatitis etc?
Those are sterilizing vaccines that survived longer scrutiny than the COVID ones, and the COVID ones are not sterilizing.
To be honest, the lies around the COVID vaccines have me now questioning those supposedly safe vaccines.
> Where does this sudden influx of people come from that are opposed to this absolute incredible work of science?
If they are anything like me, they came because of the lies we were told. Once we figured out they were lies, it was a natural thing to question other things.
And the vaccines are not an incredible work of "science." They are an engineering effort. That sounds a lot like Fauci claiming that people who criticize him are criticizing science, as though he defines what science is.
Spoiler alert, he does not.
What lies where there? The only point that I saw until now was the correlation of positive tests within 28 days that another commenter pointed out, but I don't know if that's directly a lie. Can you name one that specially bugs you?
I don't see why you refuse to call vaccines a science effort - it is wholly backed by decades of research when you consider the mRNA transport mechanism (and not the payload itself, I agree here).
Regarding those laws, as I alluded to, they don't take away people's livelihoods. And they are actual laws, not edicts by a governor.
The vaccines may have science behind their creation, but engineering always comes into play when you have to actually create something. The science created the theory, but engineering creates implementations. And I don't trust these implementations the same way I might like theory behind a programming concept but not trust implementations. Like in cryptography.