“I am paying you for half your days worth of time so you better shape up”
They have already done hairsplitting analysis on the few stragglers. They figured we will go full stasi if they quit f* ‘em. We are still a market monopoly protectorate of the government. It will barely make a dent.
I could care less about Google. Maybe some employees will leave they will not. 2021 is a sad year.
The reason why drunk driving is so dangerous is because of the choices of past governments to make implicit subsidies for cars and urban planners making car dependent suburbia.
Our choices are already constrained before we even realize it and yet people chose to die on the vaccination hill.
So they were checking every morning when you were taking your company car that you had no alcohol in your blood? How did that work? Your boss was waiting at the door?
You're talking about employment where the employer makes much much of off your labor than you will ever receive, and you are powerless to demand your fair share. Yet instead, a safe workplace is the coercive part?
If you don't want to be coerced, you had better not be an employee with wages. Go out there and start your own business.
It’s hilarious to see HN flip from “I dream of a future where no one has to work and fall under the yoke of greedy employers” to “just get injected with this drug and be thankful you have a job; don’t get it and you deserve to starve”.
The vaccines are the magic future where a small bit of technology prevents disease and death.
> don’t get it and you deserve to starve
It's not by chance that you have to make up ridiculous words and put them in my mouth to attempt to criticize the comment, either in this part where I quoted you, or in the weird assertion about no one having to work.
> The vaccines are the magic future where a small bit of technology prevents disease and death.
That's the part I've found so disappointing about this: a couple of decades of development and we have a massive breakthrough in our ability to rapidly create and update vaccines which precisely target near-arbitrary targets. Seeing what would have been a sci-fi technology when I was a kid being the target of so many conspiracy theories must be incredibly disappointing to all of the actual medical experts who worked so hard on this.
Those medical experts should look at themselves for why people react this way.
An absolute refusal to accept any legal liability for harms done by the product, whilst simultaneously insisting it's perfectly safe? Check.
Claims that anyone worried about long term effects is a crazy malicious person when Moderna was failing to progress beyond animal trials due to multi-dose toxicity as recently as 2017? Check. [2]
Fanatical insistence on forced vaccination, even when the logical basis for mandates has been invalidated by equal infectiousness? Check. [1]
Constantly shifting claims about effectiveness, invalidated within months yet all presented with absolute confidence? Check.
Insistence that nobody look at the database of injuries and papers which do so should be retracted, despite it existing specifically to be analyzed? Check.
A million different non-vaccine explanations for the sudden spike in public heart attacks, none of which are remotely plausible? Check.
We could go on for many pages of this. The medical/public health establishment has consistently wrecked their own credibility and acted in untrustworthy, suspicion-raising ways. They don't then get to make a sad face and say "but sci fi". Let us know when Pfizer/Moderna can be taken to court for injuries and deaths caused by their sci-fi tech, and interest will grow.
If I wanted antivax propaganda, I could get it myself. You're just copy-and-pasting things you don't understand so I won't be spending time on further replies.
Even if you think his arguments are silly, it would be more effective to use facts and data to destroy his argument instead of a ad hominem ("you don't understand") attack on his intelligence.
Your approach of dismissing and saying you are taking your ball and going home is not really a convincing counter-argument.
I agree in the abstract but I have seen nothing in his posting history which suggests he's interested in rationally evaluating this or has made an effort to understand what he's pasting any better than the people he copied it from.
That's just another empty insult. Anyway, consider that half of the reason people debate or take positions on forums isn't to directly convince just the person they're talking to, it's to convince people who are watching. Right now you aren't convincing people who are watching.
Also, really, I should be convincible. A few years ago I was quite like you. I even occasionally used anti-vaxx as a slur, a shorthand for crazy illogical conspiracy theorist, although I'm now ashamed to admit it. I didn't ever review their arguments because I already "knew" they were wrong. Well, and because it was irrelevant as there were no vaccines I was being asked to take. Things changed a lot in just two years.
Moreover, like many people on this forum, I'm a specialist who owes my position and status in society to expertise. I don't like the idea that huge numbers of specialized experts appear to be in the grip of some sort of mass hysteria or collectivist ideology in which the downsides of massive social interventions are simply taboo to discuss. That degrades respect for all kinds of specialism and expertise, in all fields, even if not equally.
Really the most concerning and effective anti-vaxx propaganda, as you put it, is exactly the sort of responses you're posting now. Not "here's evidence that point X is wrong" but rather, almost boastful proclamations that they aren't going to engage in the discussion at all because they are too intellectually pure to do so. It looks and sounds like a sort of fanaticism.
HN used to be firmly anti-FBI/CIA and pro-Assange. Something flipped that around such that the FBI and CIA are Real American Heroes and Assange is some sort of Russian asset. The NSA is still a bit of a bogeyman here, but even that may not hold.
HN is also filled with people who were OccupyWallStreet or AntiWar types who now bloviate endlessly on portfolio management and advocate for the invasion of Iran/Syria/Russia/China/etc.
And don't even get me started on the cypherpunks, the phrack guys, etc. There might be one or two of them left who aren't actively wiping their asses with the CAM or Hacker Manifesto daily.
I suspect that evolving from eating Ramen and reading zines in a communal hackerspace to being paid $400k/yr to analyze the click habits of a billion people changes a person.
The anti-war/free love/hippie/flower power boomers did precisely the same thing, of course. Money and status will always kill lofty ideals. Always.
At my restaurant we save money by never cleaning the kitchen. No one should coerce me into doing something where it is not necessary. Cleaning wastes my time and money and it's my freedom to not clean! No one should take that freedom away in a free country!
It hadn't occurred to me that this might lead a whole bunch of people, who didn't previously, to regard the employment relationship as fundamentally coercive. Hm. I'm now torn on this.
For many people, it's more than just a jab, it's 1-3 days of being quite unwell.
I have no underlying health conditions, but I've been bedridden by my 2nd shot and booster shots, with a high fever, fatigue, dizziness, and aches for at least 48 hours. My partner who is immuno-compromised is worse off, generally being very ill for 1-2 weeks after each jab. Her case is somewhat different though, as her situation is just all round unfortunate.
I'm not saying I won't continue to comply with all health advisories for vaccination or other public safety measures, and I'm not saying vaccines aren't worth it for society. But it's not "just" a jab.
This is why the company I work for will give you up to three paid days off after getting a vaccine shot. Feeling bad after the shot should not be a reason to not get it.
The pro vaccination camp has been more annoying than the antivaxers - at least the nutjobs are easy to filter out, it takes soo long to wade through the bullshit when it's veiled as facts.
Until it isn't. Then what are you going to do? Probably nothing except suffer debilitation for life or death (~20,000 that have been reported to VAERS, so probably substantially more).
I saw less than half that number — 8099 — on the VAERS site.
And this is for a disease which has killed 821,335 Americans after infecting 51 million.
So if it’s absolutely perfectly safe and there is a roughly 5% chance of getting infected with Covid while waiting for the vaccine to take effect, it would look like this.
Not sure where you get that number. Also, the numbers for VAERS entry are very probably not even in the ballpark of all injuries because doctors don't often advertise VAERS or even enter patient data there. Why would they, it's basically extra work they don't get paid for.
I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
I get that it can be a serious disease for some, but it's rare unless you're already in poor health. The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
> The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
Last year the UK ran short of mortuaries and body bags.
On several occasions, hospitals have been unable to meet demand in various different ways, from beds (meaning staff for them rather than literally beds), to oxygen.
> I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
My condolences.
But it works both ways: If he’d had a recent vaccine instead of a covid infection, that would be listed on VAERS as correlated to the vaccine, from what I gather.
Most of the case (>99.9%), it's very likely just a temporal correlation rather than real causation. Even without vaccine, thousands of healthy people die every day without any prior sign and vaccine doesn't change that.
>We were promised this wouldn't happen by our governments last year right?
We were promised that a company can't require a vaccine as a condition of employment? Seeing as some companies have required vaccines for as long as there have been vaccines, I think I must be misunderstanding you.
>Why are private companies stuck policing these absurd policies?
Companies are requiring the vaccine because they make employees less likely to miss work due to illness.
With the exception of healthcare I don't think a lot of companies have mandated vaccines. My wife works in healthcare and there was a tuberculosis shot mandate for specific jobs at her hospital. There was a flu shot mandate of sorts, but it was tied to a small bonus.
You can't point to a small sector that has mandates and say it wouldn't be a significant change if suddenly 100% of all workers everywhere were subjected to it.
My employer already went this route, something about a fed mandate for their contractors... and we have a lot of those. They extended it to everyone lol
Millions of people in various sectors outside healthcare (by the way, since when is healthcare a "small sector"?) have had vaccines required as a condition of employment. , mostly people with plenty of risk like teachers, the military and some people working in the travel industry, but this is not always the case. I was required to get the flu shot (or an exemption) in my last job at an electrical engineering firm.
On a broader note, I think (coming from the US) workers should have stronger protections against being fired, but everyone I've personally talked to who does not believe your employer should be able to fire you for not getting a vaccine is also opposed to "state controlled employment" or almost anything else that exerts control over the employer-employee relationship. You can be fired for almost any reason in the US, being fired for not getting a vaccine does not seem any worse to me than being fired for any number of awful yet totally legal reasons.
As a counterpoint, when I worked for a private university (unrelated to healthcare) I was required to have up-to-date vaccinations. I was also not allowed to smoke on campus.
These kinds of workplace safety rules may be more common than you think.
That’s not how infectious diseases work. You can be getting other people sick. Vaccines aren’t 100% effective so prolonged exposure in indoor spaces increases chances. Some people also are immuno compromised and can’t be vaccinated so you’d be putting them at risk too. Are you going to start paying for their sick time too and signing away that you’re personally liable for deaths?
That's not boolean: vaccinated individuals transmit _less_ than the unvaccinated. It's not as good as we'd like but it's better than doing nothing and given how quick, easy, and cheap vaccines are it's like mandating seatbelt usage even if you know that some people will still be injured.
"In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated)."
No difference in infectiousness. And with it, no logical justification for mandates. But this is Google and factions within it will certainly not give up a chance to get rid of what remains of the conservative/libertarian part of their workforce.
That's not incompatible with my point: vaccines are not 100% protection, as medical professional warned us about since before the vaccines were deployed. Household transmission is the worst-case scenario because you're talking about very long periods of unmasked shared airspace, often with poor ventilation, and close contact.
For an employer, this tells you that you can't rely on one thing to prevent spread but the combination of masks, vaccination, air filtration, etc. remains effective.
There's a substantive difference between none and "not 100%". Medical professionals didn't warn anyone about zero effectiveness < 12 months after deployment. They said, repeatedly, that vaccines were 95% effective and anyone who had any concerns about the trials were just crazy and unscientific.
Probably hospitals and care homes are actually the worst-case scenarios for viral transmission because they're full of people who are already sick or have weak immune systems.
You've ignored the point about illogicality completely.
you will have to come with a citation needed to make that claim. I have seen studies showing exactly the opposite of what you claim.
You also have to factor the social aspect. Vaccinated people, thinking they are protected, are way less careful now and therefore have a higher propensity to transmit the virus.
I keep hearing this in this thread but I don’t follow.
> Based on evidence from clinical trials, in people ages 18 years and older, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.
If you’re prevent infection, aren’t you effectively reducing the R0 by definition? How is the vaccine making it harder to infect not reduce transmission rates?
Yes, these are the original data from clinical studies. Now, in real life, a few months later the efficiency has dwindled considerably [0]:
> Reports of waning vaccine-induced immunity against COVID-19 have begun to surface. With that, the comparable long-term protection conferred by previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear.
"Remains unclear" is very different from "no impact on transmission rates". Here's the follow-up paper from the same group [1]
> These results suggest that the vaccine is initially effective in reducing infectiousness of breakthrough infections even with the Delta variant, and that while this protectiveness effect declines with time it can be restored, at least temporarily, with a booster vaccine.
The paper you're looking at is analyzing waning immunity against the Delta variant.
The first sentence of the article is that it's about "People who are fully vaccinated against Covid yet catch the virus". If the vaccines don't lower P(transmission|infection) but do lower P(infection), then they lower P(infection & transmission) (because that's the product of those two).
It's also not how other workplace safety rules work. You can't just sign a waiver allowing you to go without a hard hat on a construction job. Vaccination during a raging deadly pandemic seems to fall squarely in the "workplace safety" category, like banning smoking, which few people seem to have a problem with. Employers have a responsibility to take steps to ensure their place of work is not hazardous.
When I miss work, it costs the company much more than my salary. Otherwise what would be the point of hiring me, if I cost exactly as much as what the value I bring to the company?
And that's not even accounting for the fact that if you get sick, you might infect others in your company.
That covers you but what about the members of staff who actually have a genuine reason for not receiving the vaccine? Peter in ops recently received a double lung transplant and no longer has a functioning immune system. Are you prepared to also sign an agreement barring yourself from ever walking into one of our offices or attending social gatherings?
If Peter in ops has no immune system, he will get sick from non-COVID viruses or diseases regardless of what is done by other people. In that hypothetical situation it would be him who shouldn't go to an office, not other people.
I'm not sure why you immediately assume this is hypothetical. I know a couple people in similar situations. They exist and are not so uncommon as to assume the OP is making it up.
It's also not the doom scenario you describe. Yes they have to take extra precautions, and yes the people around then have to make a point to not be around when they are sick, but with a little consideration plenty of people with highly compromised immune systems live meaningful lives.
I don't think weight is a protected category, so yes this is fine. For example insurers will discriminate based on weight. The military discriminates based on weight. Hooters discriminates based on weight. Etc.
In general, when an employment discrimination is not specifically forbidden via the Civil Rights Act (or interpreted as equivalent to something explicitly forbidden by the Court), it is legal to discriminate based on it in the United States. Beyond that, the Court and the legislature are (from a political philosophy standpoint) generally willing to let individual employees and employers (or employers and unions) hash out the messy details.
I'm going to say it. As a left-libertarian, I see government and industry working hand in hand. The public is always being distracted from what the industry is doing, by being told it's their responsibility to clean up the mess. Let me take the lid off it so you can't unsee it:
1) The industry adds highly processed sugars and starches into foods, genetically engineers high fructose corn syrup into everything and overuses antibiotics for animals. As a result, we have unprecedented levels of diabetes and obesity in this country, even for kids. (And by the way this has correlated heavily with morbidity and mortality from this coronavirus.) https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/dphs/nhp/documents/sugar.pdf
What is the public told? Exercise consumer choice. Diet and exercise, take care of it yourself. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The brainwashing gets so bad that they rose up in arms against Bloomberg's ban on giant sugary drink containers, in the name of "freedom".
2) The industry turns all farms into factory farms, as a result of capitalist competition so the hamburger can be $1 cheaper. Billions of animals are raised in appalling conditions. Chickens for example are caged with dung dropping from the animals above them, and can barely even spread a single wing. Their beaks are cut off so they don't peck each other. Pigs, turkeys and others are treated horribly as well. Antibiotics are overused in order to make them bigger, which might begin to lead to superbugs that make this pandemic seem like a walk in the park (I hope I am wrong) https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/blogs/antibiotic-resist...
What is the public told? Exercise consumer choice. Go vegetarian. You can change the world, etc. But this isn't your grandmother's farming industry. People are used to having cheap meat but they don't think about what happens behind the scenes. They even used to happily eat "pink slime" in hot dogs, McDonalds etc.
3) Plastic containers. While beer companies still use glass, companies like Coca Cola and Snapple have switched from glass to plastic, to save money on transportation, and so forth. But the materials are non-biodegradeable, so it produces externalities all over the world. Same with clothing companies and polyesther and other plastics. Instead of researching and switching to non-biodegreadeable plastic, they push their negative externalities onto the environment and people: https://theconversation.com/plastic-plastic-everywhere-airbo...
What is the public told? Exercise consumer choice. Opt out of plastic bags and straws. Some cities are now MANDATING this, yet the companies upstream continue to produce metric tons of this crap every day.
4) Fossil fuels. We all heard of this one. But do you realize that the vehicle are locked into a monopoly of fossil fuels, and that the electric car could have been already invented if the government wasn't distorting the market subsidizing fossil fuels for all these decades against OPEC and others? They pollute ...
There is no medical secret anymore? Being vaccinated or not should be, and remain, a private decision - with your doctor as a counterpart. Your employer has nothing to do in it.
the serious health crisis where mostly people with 3-4 comorbidities (or old age) are dying? It's rather a crisis when your population is not being very healthy in the first place.
It’s not that goddamn hard to understand to even average intelligence people.. where do people with serious symptoms go when they can barely breath? To the hospital. Does the hospital has limited capacity? Yes. Will they be flooded really quickly when a disease grows exponentially? Hopefully you know the answer.
Now, tell me, where do healthy 20 years olds go (who I guess you are able to emphasize with, or is that only yourself?) when they get in an accident? Is a cancer discovered at the prime of someone’s life “comormibidity”?
Abortion is not even remotely comparable to this particular issue since it doesn't harm anyone but the real stakeholders. Not getting vaccine threaten everyone around you. Probably it's more comparable to the idiom "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins".
I am also kind of tired of hearing those who tries to turn this complex statistical problem into a simple binary problem in order to make an argument against vaccine.
Yeah, it's not a binary problem but the reproduction rate drastically decreases with vaccine. Vaccinated people may transmit the virus, but they're less likely to get infected at the first moment AND less likely to spread. This is supported by ACTUAL DATA from everywhere, including Israel and Portugal.
What's the fuzz about anti vaxxers always talking about "won't stop infection" or "stop the pandemic" - 1st this is not black and white - 2nd and nowhere I have seen that these are the actual arguments for these measures?
> "won't stop infection" or "stop the pandemic" - 1st this is not black and white
Seriously. Mitigating the damage from failure to contain and eradicate the virus when we had the chance (in the precious few early weeks where lockdowns had that potential, but guess what, the same people f'd that up) involves filter after filter after filter. Each filter reduces spread and severity by some amount. Masks reduce (but don't eliminate) transmission. Vaccines reduce (but don't eliminate) infections. Vaccines reduce the length of infection, reducing transmission. Lockdowns and social distancing reduce the spread. On and on. Every single measure is applying a filter that might only be 90% successful. That is no way a logical argument for no filter at all.
These people really don't understand how bad this pandemic would be if we had no mitigation measures at all. The entire hospital system would collapse and millions (more--probably tens of millions) would die. Yet that's what they constantly argue for. Yet forcing people to get a needle in their arm is "draconian".
> in the precious few early weeks where lockdowns had that potential
We have enough data by now, worldwide, to clearly say that lockdowns were completely bullshit and ineffective. There is virtually no correlation with viral spread and lockdown status.
> to clearly say that lockdowns were completely bullshit and ineffective.
You're saying that ineffective, half-hearted lockdowns elsewhere were ineffective? Hold the phone.
Victoria, Australia. South Korea. Wuhan. New Zealand. Singapore.
These lockdowns eradicated the virus locally--for several months at a time; but they are precarious, leaky ships due to the virus spreading everywhere else. An effective worldwide lockdown was exponentially more difficult. But very large countries with the ability to isolate themselves from international travel did do effective lockdowns, so I will not be accepting your narrative above.
> Force people into draconian measures that won't stop infection and violate their rights.
It won't stop infection. But it greatly reduces that rate and, above all, your risk of death and the strength of the disease in general in case you do catch it.
> Convince them that it's necessary to stop the pandemic without giving any arguments.
The argument should be very clear: vaccines are a known and easy way to make the virus a non-threat, or a small one at that.
To that end, you can see the numbers for yourself after vaccination started[1] and how greatly the number of deaths and cases has reduced.
> Have them defend your measures in public forums and feel very smart.
Given this is a place where IT Big Corp and govts. are constantly critized, I don't think anyone here is defending this as an WHO or any institution ass kisser
Then why not fire people who are overweight? That kills more people; reduces work capacity more than any other, and costs more money than any other health issue we have. Additionally, if you are healthy and do not have the comorbidities that come with being overweight your risks of being a Covid mortality is less than the flu. So to be consistent Google should fire everyone that is overweight right? And you should be totally ok with that.
Why not fire people who drive cars - the risk of dying and killing other people is greater than Covid presents for most every age category...especially those ages that are working for Google. And you should be o.k. with that too.
True .. and also you can bet that most obese people, if it would be a simple as taking a shot to get rid of that, most would likely do it at some point (similar for smokers).
Also haven't heard of just infecting others with obesity..
Actually, iirc there are studies showing people are more likely to be obese if the people around them are obese. So obesity seems to be communicable in some sense.
As for driving you are of course wrong, other bad drivers can affect your health.
You can start your own company and fire people for whatever (legal) metric you want.
It's hilarious watching the "muh personal freedoms" people complain about private entities exercising their personal freedoms because it has bad overlap with their own. Either swallow the hard pills that come with "personal freedoms" or shut up about it.
Obesity isn’t transmissible, so far as anyone knows. (With the possible exception of fecal transplants, but those are deliberate so any comparison of that to Covid would be BS).
And obesity doesn’t spike up at random intervals with enough extra hospitalisation to impede the healthcare system as a whole.
And obesity can’t be mostly prevented by getting a tiny low-risk jab in the arm every so often.
And they’re working on self driving cars precisely because it’s such a big cause of death, but those things are currently about as ready as a cure for aging. (As in: yes, but with huge caveats that make it a no in practice).
Yeah I can see that now. I honestly did not see this as a "hot take" at all; at the time of posting there was less than a handful of comments and not much engagement.
This is just life, forever. Totally unprecedented. You will get a vaccination every 6 months for the rest of your life or be totally excluded from all civil rights.
There will be no end. If the virus mutates to become harmless, the mandates will be given all the credit, and we will double down on this system. It's not temporary.
I don't believe in the rights of private companies to do just anything they want to workers. Most people don't - look at the popularity of indoor smoking bans. Most also agree a private business shouldn't be allowed to deny employment or service based on race. There are many, many such examples.
Isn't this the same argument as "The government is not allowed to censor free speech – but nothing stops it from colluding with / coercing private companies to do its dirty job"?
It is puzzling that such "bypass of privacy / speech rights" was ferociously resisted by the some of same people who now applaud the "bypass of medical / physical integrity rights". Hey look, it's not us doing the violence and suspending basic human rights – it's the private companies!
I guess people need to see how this ugly pattern plays out in full, again. I anticipate a lot of future "How could they let this happen?" and "Nobody could have foreseen this!" as well as the sad classic, "Is there no one left to stand up for me?".
I may sound like a sucker/fanboy/looser but having tried twice to enter and having failed both times I really cannot imagine giving up a role in Google because of vaccination. It just sounds like giving up so much for so little (a cause). I mean I was literally crying the first time around.
Anyway. Maybe in US/SV good jobs come easier (I'm in 2nd grade EU country) and thus you can see things clearer. Dunno
We should have thought about that when we were invading and toppling every single ecosystem out there. WHO and others were warning time and again but nothing changed. We (as a civilisation) brought this to ourselves and we have to weather it out as best as we can. So far science/vaccines/meds are the best bet. If they fcuk it up (say an mRNA batch goes really bad) then all hell will break loose. Still mandatory vaccination and free dissemination of vaccines to poor countries is the only visible way out right now.
But if this seems so difficult I wonder how battling climate change will seem to us.
> This is just life, forever. Totally unprecedented. You will get a vaccination every 6 months for the rest of your life or be totally excluded from all civil rights.
“all civil rights” meaning you have full civil rights but can't force a private company to give you a job when you refuse to follow safety rules? Especially in a country where employers pay for healthcare it doesn't seem unreasonable to require a safe, easy, and highly effective means of avoiding very expensive treatments.
This is also far from unprecedented. I've worked at jobs which required other vaccinations, schools all around the country require a ton of vaccinations, and the people who don't want to do that for whatever reason have always had the option of homeschooling, finding another job, etc. If this is such an important issue to you, take responsibility for the consequences of your choice — there's certainly a long tradition of people accepting that as a cost of their religious decisions.
If we eventually define "civil rights" to mean "you have the right to stay inside your home and order everything on Amazon", we have a serious problem. That's where this is going. It goes way beyond the decisions of an individual company.
Regarding the status quo: Yes, mandates exist. The school example is a piece of paper you turn into the school office during enrollment and no one ever thinks about it again. It's not a status tracked in real time, apps don't have to be presented to enter buildings. And in most cases, people can file for exemptions if it really matters to them.
Have you been this upset all this while at the fact that international students have been required to take a bunch of different vaccines as a prerequisite for admission in US colleges ? You may have been, I don't know.
In fact, in my state all students, international or not, are required tot take a bunch of different vaccines before they are allowed to attend classes.
My friend started college in his late 30s and didn't have access to his childhood immunizations since it was so long ago. He had to get a blood test showing immunity before he could attend class.
It seems like the vax every 6 months is a worst-ish case scenario (worst case being, some mutation is like 100% vax resistant, no one can figure it out, and a lot more people die). Well, one is also supposed to get a dental cleaning every 6 months. The nice thing about the vax is, jab takes 2 seconds and no one bugs you about flossing. I don't see why this would be such a chore.
You're forgetting that a majority of the companies implementing these policies are doing so at the behest of the federal government. You think Google doesn't do business with the US government, who does business with drug manufacturers? Private company? on PAPER, sure...
Government mandating private business to inject their workers every 6 months to save face (and $$$) for the "vaccine" manufacturers is fascist and anti-human. Thankfully the over-arching Biden mandate probably won't go anywhere, but large companies such as Google are doing this as a political and financial move. NOT FOR HEALTH
When politics and money make it necessary for companies to coerce people into injections every 6 months, a constantly shifting definition of "vaccinated", then things should be re-evaluated. And if you believe in this garbage you should honestly re-evaluate your concept of liberty.
Most of my co-workers who have kids will not go back to our office unless our company enforces a vaccine mandate. So anecdotally, I can say that at least some workers at some companies are also putting pressure on to implement vaccine mandates.
> You will get a vaccination every 6 months for the rest of your life or be totally excluded from all civil rights.
This is like the free speech debate. You have the right to say whatever you like. Other people don't have to put up with it by listening to you though. Just as if you don't get a vaccine, other people won't want to work with you.
Let's see how far you get walking around completely naked. My guess is about 2 to 3 city blocks. Your civil rights have always been constrained to protect both the safety and sensibilities of those around you. It's the cost of an increasingly crowded planet full of people who also have rights.
Pretty sure they have shops there, as well. However, the people stocking the shops probably put on some clothes when they need to venture outside to get supplies.
Well I have never witnessed a mythical naked shopping mall, just some outdoor parks and gardens out away from most other people where only the clued-in would go. It is not ok to go out naked in public!
My reference for nudism is various parts of the Isar and Englisch Garten in Munich. In the US, nudist sites aren't really a thing, certainly not in any major city.
I know the Englische Garten. You can't go shopping in the nude there. I was talking about nudist camps.
Afaik in the former socialist east Germany, nudist culture was actually a kind of rebellion against the government.
You may need to update your priors. In Seattle, for example, going about your business naked in the city is not only legal, but determined to be a Constitutionally protected civil right by the courts decades ago. (And as is very evident, some people choose to exercise that right.)
Funny how now 3rd world countries have more freedom than 1st world countries due to covid.
Places like Brazil, some countries in Africa, Belarus.
A few exceptions are Sweden, Texas and Florida.
I wish I had the money to move to one of those 3 (I might land a job soon that might allow me to move to Florida very soon).
Might be able to spend 6 months in Florida and 6 months in Brazil, maybe a couple of months in my home country (south american, also not draconian and everything's open but we'll see about it in January).
Don't agree and I feel like the hyperbole I see by people on both sides of "political" issues is out of hand. Yes, this issue has become political even though it shouldn't be.
Maybe the shortage of competent developers will end one day but until then, there is a very competitive labor market for all technical people not just developers. In this market, workers are not required to come into an office therefore vaccination is not an issue.
If they act on the threat, it's at their own peril and other businesses will gain. It's not the end of civil rights though.
At some point I wonder if health insurers will start denying claims related to the treatment of COVID infections if the person is eligible for the vaccine but has refused to get one?
On TV today I saw that Kroger employees don't get sick day pay if they are off because of COVID unless they have been vaccinated (and I would assume there's a medical exemption).
Please don't overuse the word racism. Yes, a smaller percentage of black people in both the US and Canada are vaccinated. Yes they have very good reasons to be distrustful of government and institutions in general. It doesn't mean the vaccine distribution or enforcement is racist.
I am very much against the forced vaccinations of people, and I very much abhor what is happening in Canada (where I live) with the vaccine passports and the making of the unvaccinated second class citizens. But don't make the term racism a worthless term by using it for everything. It's counterproductive.
I say all this as a black Trinidadian immigrant that lives in Canada. I am vaccinated myself, but many black people I know are not.
I am not going to state here whether I think it would or would not be racist.
I am saying though, that if you unilaterally denied COVID care to non-vaccinated patients, that would be the equivalent of denying service to ~70% of "young black people," which would be easy bait for people calling that racist. Which is why the health system probably won't do it.
I understand what you're saying actually. I mean, if that hinders the enforcement of vaccination to exist in society, then I'm on board I guess. Even if I would prefer if people got vaccinated.
Ah yeah, anti-vaxxers (I'm not calling you one) grasping at straws including calling the vax mandates racist because of the low vax uptake from Black people.
If it was a policy that's based on something that the Black people can't change about them (e.g. refusal to entry to a club based on your address, with majority black areas of town being in that list), and it disadvantages them, yes that'd be racist. But in this case, the Black people (or whoever) can easily change it by getting vaxed...
Racism by intent and racism by outcome are both racism.
Regarding the latter, it's not difficult to create a policy that's non-racist in construction, but has reliably racist results. Correlated parameters, etc. Whether anything can or should be done about it is a thornier question.
In my country (EU) COVID incidents get handled by public health system only. Which was not in great shape to begin with. Health insurers had bailed out since day zero on COVID.
There's lately though talk about unvaccinated COVID patients bearing the cost nonetheless. Note that public health system is for free.
In my country (also EU) the public health system is most definitely not "free". It is paid for by a universal tax called (insidiously and inaccurately) "health insurance".
> There's lately though talk about unvaccinated COVID patients bearing the cost nonetheless.
Calls for true insurance (individualized, based on actual health and habits) are completely infeasible for political reasons.
What I can see happening is the existing mandatory health tax PLUS extra payments for non-grata groups. Some constitutional changes may be needed, but since all the right people would profit (extra $$$), that's just a technical detail in this day and age.
I'm not sure I follow you but a few things are apparent to me at 45 yrs of age:
1. public health system will take care of you to its abilities (which to a large extent are defined by the taxation yes)
2. no private insurer is paying or covering anything COVID-related and they never did
3. been trying to get private insurance on top of the public one and I'm told time and again that a few systems of mine will be excluded (i.e. they won't insure me for anything bearing the remotest possibility of actually needing them for). Also that I am too old to start now...
if anything is clear from the COVID story in my mind is that we need a better and more capable public health system. Private healthcare is not about health or care.
Not true. It's trivial to spread immorality and normalize it which would lead to risky sexual behavior. We're literally living through it now. Just look at how things slid in the past 100 years on that front.
People who engage in risky sexual behavior increase the spread of STDs in the population as a whole, causing increased risk even for those who don't engage in risky sexual behavior. The parallels to COVID seem pretty clear, no?
This is a grossly disingenuous analogy. A vaccine is trivial to get, takes no willpower, isn’t a result of addiction, isn’t negatively influenced by such factors as advertising, restaurants, food deserts, requires no trust in individuals, etc.
I have never seen a person trying hard to get vaccinated with available vaccines all around them unable to do so. I have seen people attempt to lose weight. The fact that it’s big business is a testament to this.
Sexual behavior, well yea there is careless behavior but also deceit. How would you tell the difference?
With vaccines, the end goal is to get people to get the vaccine so they can live their normal lives. There is no one time simple action someone can take to prevent obesity. There is no vaccine for all stds I’m aware of.
I would not be in favor of denying health insurance claims but I would be less averse to allowing health insurance companies to factor in certain chronically risky behaviors when calculating health insurance premiums.
For example, a smoker who is not actively engaged in a smoking cessation program or someone who is morbidly obese by choice and not actively engaged in a medical weight loss program should be paying higher health-insurance premiums to offset their increased costs. (The former is not uncommon and while the latter may be controversial it is not necessarily a niche perspective. [1])
So yes, I think the same logic should apply to individuals who choose not to receive vaccines.
Not denial, but businesses classified as for profit are certainly within moral rights to claim risk appropriate premium.
Insurance companies have to toe the thin line between a business and a social good. With prediction models to become more and more accurate I would be happier if we have non-profit insurance that amortizes/socializes the draw of the lottery. For voluntary choices of risky behavior, drug addiction, unsafe sex, etc etc., I think insurance companies are within their rights to charge more.
I would agree in principle, but notice that health "insurance" has migrated from a risk-management product to a health care financing/service provision mechanism.
Health insurers want to increase, or at least maintain, their profits. They won't deny claims because they want a better society, they want to minimize their financial risk.
So yes, one would expect to be in their commercial interest to deny cancer claims to people who willingly put themselves at excessive risk of cancer at some point in the future. It's the infinite wisdom of the free market!
Quitting alcohol is nowhere as easy as getting covid vaccines. If there was a cheap/free safe vaccine that reduced the chances of getting hospitalized or dying of cancer by >60%, your point would be more valid.
They are clearly not the same, but you first have to make the claim that insurance coverage should be tied to ease of prevention at all, before arguing where the line should be.
I'm not aware of any other risky behaviors that exclude coverage, so this would be a precedent.
If you don't have 3-4 comordibities your risk of hospitalization + dying of COVID is so low it's close to zero. Not sure what you point is, unless you consider everyone has loads of comorbidities out there.
> Quitting alcohol is nowhere as easy as getting covid vaccines
you have a choice to buy the next bottle or not, as far as I know. It's not like addiction is unavoidable. And cancer risk for alcohol consumption is not even related to addiction, you increase your risk of cancer significantly even with a small, non-zero consumption of alcohol. Look at the data.
But isn't that the point of insurance? You pay in some money to offset the risk of an unlikely yet massive expense? What's special about covid versus other risky activities that individuals can take action to offset? Even something as horribly negligent as drunk-driving is handled by insurance. So are drug overdoses.
IMO this sentiment is just another manifestation of the overwhelming desire to punish the unvaccinated, rather than being based on clear thinking.
If you have a drunk driving conviction, your insurance rates are going to go way up. If you are a drug addict, your life insurance premiums will be very high. I suppose the appropriate response to people who choose to not get vaccinated would be to pay a higher premium to account for the extra risk.
Usually, insurance companies do this carrot-style, not stick-style (i.e. they will give you a premiums discount of some kind if you get a COVID vaccine, or possibly even a one-off gift like a gift card or toaster or something).
... but yes, they definitely already do similar things to influence customer behavior (such as discounts on weight loss programs).
What I find sad about this is how many who seem to be against it were just recently so in favour of private business autonomy [1].
No one's rights are being violated here. If you don't want to get vaccinated, you can. But those choices come with consequences, like just about every other choice we make.
It's worth noting that fully remote people won't fall under this policy (from my reading of it anyway) so this isn't a blanket policy.
It's also worth noting that a whole bunch of vaccines are required to attend public school already [2].
My Dad has a big divot out of his arm from the vaccine gun when he joined the army. Everyone got a vaccine and that is how it was because the decision was science-based and not up for discussion. Same for when I went to school. Kid not vaccinated? You aren’t going to school. Somehow that got eroded by madness.
What about the rest of our modern scientific knowledge base? Gravity. Electromagnetism. Chemistry. Biology. There are entire swathes of disciplines that are well nailed down by results, and used daily as though they were fact. Because they work reliably.
So I'm going to call BS on the idea that science can't be conclusive because of the definition of the scientific method. It's arguing in bad faith to point at the 1% and ignore the 99%.
My dad told me about getting his polio vaccination during the public health drives of the 1960s. They did an entire grade school in a single day. And there were parents who were furious about it at the time. No progress happens without protest.
But personally, I'm pretty damn thankful for their sacrifice so that we live in a largely polio-free world today.
I'm not sure when "what you can do for your country" got so small that people aren't willing to take the minuscule risk of vaccination side effects in order to gift the substantial benefit to their neighbors. Used to be, selfishness like that made you an asshole.
These are the same people who fought net neutrality on the grounds of "protecting private entities (ISPs) from government overreach" and then a few years later were petitioning their congressmen to write laws regulating speech on twitter.
The quality of the reasoning in these above opinions is a useful example of not believing in the standard of logic, consistency, or truth - technically nihilism of the most banal kind. A choice on the condition of consequences is not free or a choice. This deflection of responsibility by the company providing the "choice" is pure gaslighting, and the sadistic glee with which people repeat these slogans should be indicative of who you are dealing with.
It's very close to what is called Hobson's Choice (take it or leave it, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Hobson's%20choice..., but it's really closer to Harvey's (Weinstein's) Bargain, where you are free to join him or not and if you don't, the part goes to someone else. It's not quite a quid-pro-quo, as the threat is to take something from you that you already have.
Companies appear free to offer Hobson's Choice, except they haven't been up until now, and the pandemic narrative has provided air cover for a political purity purge. Anyone who is sceptical of the internal passport system the vax is being used to implement probably isn't a culture fit at a platform company anyway, and they should talk to an employment lawyer about their options for getting a settlement for constructive dismissal.
Otherwise, you can't argue with a nihilist position, as it uses discourse to filter people through a lens of alignment to power and narrative, and has no interest in reconciling to truth.
> It's also worth noting that a whole bunch of vaccines are required to attend public school already [2].
Vaccines required at school while children don't get any kind of side effects of COVID19 anyway (and get more risks from the vaccine than anything else). This is so far from any kind of Science.
> Vaccines required at school while children don't get any kind of side effects of COVID19
Other than dying [1] you mean?
Dying aside, children can still spread the virus. I’m sure someone will make the straw man argument of “the vaccine doesn’t 100% prevent transmission”, which is true but no one claimed it did. It does however improve the situation.
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
rights are are social constructs created by people, we are as such allowed to re-evaluate them, unless you are speaking in a specific context of law/convention(s).
Also, wrt to that [1]; refusing customer business and firing employees are entirely different things, even if they both fit the description "business autonomy".
1. It's really not about business autonomy. In many states businesses don't have the option to bring everyone back to the office unrestricted. Getting everyone vaccinated is just the path of least resistance within legal limits.
2. I can't believe people still parrot the "choice with consequences" argument. If abortion is persecuted in Texas, is that just a choice with consequences? The only premise that matters is whether threatening someones livelihood -- which is quite frankly a nuclear option -- is a fair and proportional response.
3. Last but not least, vaccine precedents cut both ways. Measles and smallpox don't mutate and require new vaccines. Covid does. Measles and smallpox don't discriminate by age. Covid does. Measles and smallpox vaccines don't have notable adverse effects on young people. The Covid vaccine does.
Covid has little in common with measles and smallpox, which are mandated. It does however have a lot in common with the flu, both the disease and the vaccine, which is not mandated in schools nor hospitals.
Does anybody know what exactly their rules are, as the article doesn't actually say?
Do they mandate people be vaccinated, or just that they upload their status. Or can they work from home and only have to be vaccinated to be allowed into the office?
What religion would come handy? Does the Flying Spaghetti Monster say you should not be vaccinated?
I would expect them to require some proof of religious affiliation.
Nah, just appeal to the simulation theory. ie. "I believe the Computer scientist running this simulation added the vaccine side quest as a test of gullibility and trust of big govt and big pharma."
Employees who do not wish to receive the vaccine sacrament should quit, move to Florida and found a new search engine. They are probably the better ones anyway, since they have some hacker spirit left.
How is putting a crash-developed mRNA vaccine that synthesizes custom-designed antigens into your body, in order to help the greater good, not hacker spirit?
BioNTech and Moderna are Google divisions? It is interesting that any call to action is flagged here, while polite discussion that never changes the status quo is allowed.
Intelligent adults generally get vaccinated (unless they have a preexisting medical condition), so I can imagine that Googlers don't have problem with saying goodbye to the few antivaxx colleagues.
Google itself was anti-authoritarian when it was small, for example it was campaigning for net neutrality when most of US politicians were campaigning against it.
Understanding statistics behind vaccines requires some general understanding of setting up controlled experiments (vs just looking at some numbers, like ratio of vaccinated vs unvaccinated people in hospitals without controlling for age).
Generally more intelligent people have a better understanding of statistics, and Google uses a way of intelligence test to hire people (even if that is unpopular here on HN).
I'm definitely pro-vaccine, but I'm also concerned about the long-term impact of alienating whole swaths of the country with policies like these. Perhaps there are less onerous policies that would be similarly effective?
To address the risk of transmission for in-person employees, would a combination of masking and testing be similarly effective at minimizing office outbreaks?
As for the increase in a company's health insurance costs it seems like we could simply let health insurance companies consider vaccination status when calculating an individual's health insurance premiums (like they currently do with smokers). It seems like the reasonable free-market approach to ask people to pay for any increase in risk they willingly choose to take on.
> let health insurance companies consider vaccination status when calculating an individual's health insurance premiums
If I'm in my late 20s or early 30s and in great shape and eat healthy, a vaccine is not going to make a difference in personal risk.
If anything, vaccine rates should be used by a company when getting health insurance benefits for the org as a whole.
> If I'm in my late 20s or early 30s and in great shape and eat healthy, a vaccine is not going to make a difference in personal risk.
Assuming that's true then I'd expect your health insurance premiums to remain similar regardless of your vaccination status. I didn't mean to argue that people who are unvaccinated should be charged more, I meant to argue that vaccination status should be added as a sixth factor that health insurance companies are legally allowed to use to set premiums. (The ACA already allows them to consider things like tobacco use and age.)
> If anything, vaccine rates should be used by a company when getting health insurance benefits for the org as a whole.
Seems reasonable. If it results in cost increases for the company it would be up to the company to decide how to pass that on to employees. (I.e. should everyone pay a little more, just the unvaccinated, or should the company eat the cost?)
> Hasn’t it always been the case that younger people vaccinate to help keep the older protected?
No, polio for example.
> Also, you don’t need to die of Covid to be placed in a hospital. Fewer available beds affects everyone.
"Collective ownership and harm" is not an unrestricted pass for universal mandates. Everything is connected, every action you take affects someone else. Driving for example puts everyone at risk. Not just on the road but also carbon emissions. Where do we draw the line? Wherever the line is, it should be data driven. Just like mortality, hospitalizations are strongly skewed by age.
I think you and I just fundamentally see the world differently, so I'll just cut to the chase of how I see omicron, because I'm sure you see it the exact opposite way.
From what I've learned about omicron so far, it A. transmits very fast B. has high immune escape, and C. has a low incidence of severe outcome relative to other variants.
To me this sounds like a good thing as far as ending the pandemic goes. We want a highly transmissible, benign variant, agreed?
its really interesting/disturbing that people put so much blind faith in the organizations pushing these vaccines. so many people are acting unscientifically in the "pursuit of science". science is not something where you blindly trust what the corporations and authority figures tell you.
the safety trials had no control group, the approval was based on 4 months of data, the situation that we are in now seems to suggest they dont really work very well, there certainly is no long term data about what happens when you keep reinjecting boosters over and over, lipid nanoparticles themselves are a novel technology that is not very well understood, most people are at low risk and have no need for it, the list goes on
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadThey have already done hairsplitting analysis on the few stragglers. They figured we will go full stasi if they quit f* ‘em. We are still a market monopoly protectorate of the government. It will barely make a dent.
I could care less about Google. Maybe some employees will leave they will not. 2021 is a sad year.
It feels like the public are building their own prisons. Why are private companies stuck policing these absurd policies?
Our choices are already constrained before we even realize it and yet people chose to die on the vaccination hill.
If you don't want to be coerced, you had better not be an employee with wages. Go out there and start your own business.
> don’t get it and you deserve to starve
It's not by chance that you have to make up ridiculous words and put them in my mouth to attempt to criticize the comment, either in this part where I quoted you, or in the weird assertion about no one having to work.
That's the part I've found so disappointing about this: a couple of decades of development and we have a massive breakthrough in our ability to rapidly create and update vaccines which precisely target near-arbitrary targets. Seeing what would have been a sci-fi technology when I was a kid being the target of so many conspiracy theories must be incredibly disappointing to all of the actual medical experts who worked so hard on this.
An absolute refusal to accept any legal liability for harms done by the product, whilst simultaneously insisting it's perfectly safe? Check.
Claims that anyone worried about long term effects is a crazy malicious person when Moderna was failing to progress beyond animal trials due to multi-dose toxicity as recently as 2017? Check. [2]
Fanatical insistence on forced vaccination, even when the logical basis for mandates has been invalidated by equal infectiousness? Check. [1]
Constantly shifting claims about effectiveness, invalidated within months yet all presented with absolute confidence? Check.
Insistence that nobody look at the database of injuries and papers which do so should be retracted, despite it existing specifically to be analyzed? Check.
A million different non-vaccine explanations for the sudden spike in public heart attacks, none of which are remotely plausible? Check.
We could go on for many pages of this. The medical/public health establishment has consistently wrecked their own credibility and acted in untrustworthy, suspicion-raising ways. They don't then get to make a sad face and say "but sci fi". Let us know when Pfizer/Moderna can be taken to court for injuries and deaths caused by their sci-fi tech, and interest will grow.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
[2] https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
Your approach of dismissing and saying you are taking your ball and going home is not really a convincing counter-argument.
Also, really, I should be convincible. A few years ago I was quite like you. I even occasionally used anti-vaxx as a slur, a shorthand for crazy illogical conspiracy theorist, although I'm now ashamed to admit it. I didn't ever review their arguments because I already "knew" they were wrong. Well, and because it was irrelevant as there were no vaccines I was being asked to take. Things changed a lot in just two years.
Moreover, like many people on this forum, I'm a specialist who owes my position and status in society to expertise. I don't like the idea that huge numbers of specialized experts appear to be in the grip of some sort of mass hysteria or collectivist ideology in which the downsides of massive social interventions are simply taboo to discuss. That degrades respect for all kinds of specialism and expertise, in all fields, even if not equally.
Really the most concerning and effective anti-vaxx propaganda, as you put it, is exactly the sort of responses you're posting now. Not "here's evidence that point X is wrong" but rather, almost boastful proclamations that they aren't going to engage in the discussion at all because they are too intellectually pure to do so. It looks and sounds like a sort of fanaticism.
I'm not sure why you have been convinced of these falsehoods, or why you think anybody else could be swayed a bit by them.
For example if you don't believe the claim about legal immunity, maybe you'll believe CNBC?
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...
At any rate, your comment is unsubstantive, which is against the HN rules.
HN used to be firmly anti-FBI/CIA and pro-Assange. Something flipped that around such that the FBI and CIA are Real American Heroes and Assange is some sort of Russian asset. The NSA is still a bit of a bogeyman here, but even that may not hold.
HN is also filled with people who were OccupyWallStreet or AntiWar types who now bloviate endlessly on portfolio management and advocate for the invasion of Iran/Syria/Russia/China/etc.
And don't even get me started on the cypherpunks, the phrack guys, etc. There might be one or two of them left who aren't actively wiping their asses with the CAM or Hacker Manifesto daily.
I suspect that evolving from eating Ramen and reading zines in a communal hackerspace to being paid $400k/yr to analyze the click habits of a billion people changes a person.
The anti-war/free love/hippie/flower power boomers did precisely the same thing, of course. Money and status will always kill lofty ideals. Always.
I have no underlying health conditions, but I've been bedridden by my 2nd shot and booster shots, with a high fever, fatigue, dizziness, and aches for at least 48 hours. My partner who is immuno-compromised is worse off, generally being very ill for 1-2 weeks after each jab. Her case is somewhat different though, as her situation is just all round unfortunate.
I'm not saying I won't continue to comply with all health advisories for vaccination or other public safety measures, and I'm not saying vaccines aren't worth it for society. But it's not "just" a jab.
Until it isn't. Then what are you going to do? Probably nothing except suffer debilitation for life or death (~20,000 that have been reported to VAERS, so probably substantially more).
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/full-hearings-ron-johnson-039...
Edit: spllng
And this is for a disease which has killed 821,335 Americans after infecting 51 million.
So if it’s absolutely perfectly safe and there is a roughly 5% chance of getting infected with Covid while waiting for the vaccine to take effect, it would look like this.
Not sure where you get that number. Also, the numbers for VAERS entry are very probably not even in the ballpark of all injuries because doctors don't often advertise VAERS or even enter patient data there. Why would they, it's basically extra work they don't get paid for.
https://vaersanalysis.info/2021/12/11/vaers-summary-for-covi...
>> ...killed 821,33 Americans...
I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
I get that it can be a serious disease for some, but it's rare unless you're already in poor health. The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html
Like I said, the VAERS site.
> The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
Last year the UK ran short of mortuaries and body bags.
On several occasions, hospitals have been unable to meet demand in various different ways, from beds (meaning staff for them rather than literally beds), to oxygen.
> I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
My condolences.
But it works both ways: If he’d had a recent vaccine instead of a covid infection, that would be listed on VAERS as correlated to the vaccine, from what I gather.
We were promised that a company can't require a vaccine as a condition of employment? Seeing as some companies have required vaccines for as long as there have been vaccines, I think I must be misunderstanding you.
>Why are private companies stuck policing these absurd policies?
Companies are requiring the vaccine because they make employees less likely to miss work due to illness.
You can't point to a small sector that has mandates and say it wouldn't be a significant change if suddenly 100% of all workers everywhere were subjected to it.
On a broader note, I think (coming from the US) workers should have stronger protections against being fired, but everyone I've personally talked to who does not believe your employer should be able to fire you for not getting a vaccine is also opposed to "state controlled employment" or almost anything else that exerts control over the employer-employee relationship. You can be fired for almost any reason in the US, being fired for not getting a vaccine does not seem any worse to me than being fired for any number of awful yet totally legal reasons.
These kinds of workplace safety rules may be more common than you think.
Then if I don't want to get a vaccine, I'll sign an agreement that if I get sick and miss work, I don't get paid, and that's the end of it.
New rule: every googler who works near immunocompromised coworkers has to wear a mask.
You must be missing the part that vaccinated people transmit the virus just the same. This is not a sterilizing vaccine we are dealing with.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
"In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated)."
No difference in infectiousness. And with it, no logical justification for mandates. But this is Google and factions within it will certainly not give up a chance to get rid of what remains of the conservative/libertarian part of their workforce.
For an employer, this tells you that you can't rely on one thing to prevent spread but the combination of masks, vaccination, air filtration, etc. remains effective.
Probably hospitals and care homes are actually the worst-case scenarios for viral transmission because they're full of people who are already sick or have weak immune systems.
You've ignored the point about illogicality completely.
you will have to come with a citation needed to make that claim. I have seen studies showing exactly the opposite of what you claim.
You also have to factor the social aspect. Vaccinated people, thinking they are protected, are way less careful now and therefore have a higher propensity to transmit the virus.
That's not how vaccines against COVID-19 work. They diminish the risk of severe illness and death, not transmission rates.
> Based on evidence from clinical trials, in people ages 18 years and older, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.
If you’re prevent infection, aren’t you effectively reducing the R0 by definition? How is the vaccine making it harder to infect not reduce transmission rates?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...
> Reports of waning vaccine-induced immunity against COVID-19 have begun to surface. With that, the comparable long-term protection conferred by previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 remains unclear.
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
> These results suggest that the vaccine is initially effective in reducing infectiousness of breakthrough infections even with the Delta variant, and that while this protectiveness effect declines with time it can be restored, at least temporarily, with a booster vaccine.
The paper you're looking at is analyzing waning immunity against the Delta variant.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.29.21262798v...
Well, at least within households[0]:
> Research reveals fully vaccinated people are just as likely to pass virus on to those they share a home with
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/covid-vaccinat...
And that's not even accounting for the fact that if you get sick, you might infect others in your company.
It's also not the doom scenario you describe. Yes they have to take extra precautions, and yes the people around then have to make a point to not be around when they are sick, but with a little consideration plenty of people with highly compromised immune systems live meaningful lives.
In general, when an employment discrimination is not specifically forbidden via the Civil Rights Act (or interpreted as equivalent to something explicitly forbidden by the Court), it is legal to discriminate based on it in the United States. Beyond that, the Court and the legislature are (from a political philosophy standpoint) generally willing to let individual employees and employers (or employers and unions) hash out the messy details.
I'm going to say it. As a left-libertarian, I see government and industry working hand in hand. The public is always being distracted from what the industry is doing, by being told it's their responsibility to clean up the mess. Let me take the lid off it so you can't unsee it:
1) The industry adds highly processed sugars and starches into foods, genetically engineers high fructose corn syrup into everything and overuses antibiotics for animals. As a result, we have unprecedented levels of diabetes and obesity in this country, even for kids. (And by the way this has correlated heavily with morbidity and mortality from this coronavirus.) https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/dphs/nhp/documents/sugar.pdf
What is the public told? Exercise consumer choice. Diet and exercise, take care of it yourself. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The brainwashing gets so bad that they rose up in arms against Bloomberg's ban on giant sugary drink containers, in the name of "freedom".
2) The industry turns all farms into factory farms, as a result of capitalist competition so the hamburger can be $1 cheaper. Billions of animals are raised in appalling conditions. Chickens for example are caged with dung dropping from the animals above them, and can barely even spread a single wing. Their beaks are cut off so they don't peck each other. Pigs, turkeys and others are treated horribly as well. Antibiotics are overused in order to make them bigger, which might begin to lead to superbugs that make this pandemic seem like a walk in the park (I hope I am wrong) https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/blogs/antibiotic-resist...
What is the public told? Exercise consumer choice. Go vegetarian. You can change the world, etc. But this isn't your grandmother's farming industry. People are used to having cheap meat but they don't think about what happens behind the scenes. They even used to happily eat "pink slime" in hot dogs, McDonalds etc.
3) Plastic containers. While beer companies still use glass, companies like Coca Cola and Snapple have switched from glass to plastic, to save money on transportation, and so forth. But the materials are non-biodegradeable, so it produces externalities all over the world. Same with clothing companies and polyesther and other plastics. Instead of researching and switching to non-biodegreadeable plastic, they push their negative externalities onto the environment and people: https://theconversation.com/plastic-plastic-everywhere-airbo...
What is the public told? Exercise consumer choice. Opt out of plastic bags and straws. Some cities are now MANDATING this, yet the companies upstream continue to produce metric tons of this crap every day.
Oh yeah, also the public is told to RECYCLE, and that was mandated too, but it was revealed to be largely a scam in the USA: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/7025017...
4) Fossil fuels. We all heard of this one. But do you realize that the vehicle are locked into a monopoly of fossil fuels, and that the electric car could have been already invented if the government wasn't distorting the market subsidizing fossil fuels for all these decades against OPEC and others? They pollute ...
2. Convince them that it's necessary to stop the pandemic without giving any arguments.
3. Have them defend your measures in public forums and feel very smart.
Citation needed.
Can you talk us through exactly which rights you think are being violated?
Google also won't employ you if you turn up to your interview with very bad breath. That's not a violation of a right to not clean your teeth.
You're seriously confused about what a 'right' is.
There is no medical secret anymore? Being vaccinated or not should be, and remain, a private decision - with your doctor as a counterpart. Your employer has nothing to do in it.
No I don't think that's a right is it?
I've always had to disclose vaccination status prior to the pandemic to my employer for travel reasons, for example.
I recall the left has been very vocal about "my body my right" when it came to some different kind of issue.
Funny that the standards don't hold very much.
That debate is about the state forcing you to do something.
This debate is about Google opting to not employ you.
Not even remotely comparable.
Regarding abortion. Are pregnancies contagious now, creating a serious public health crisis?
the serious health crisis where mostly people with 3-4 comorbidities (or old age) are dying? It's rather a crisis when your population is not being very healthy in the first place.
Now, tell me, where do healthy 20 years olds go (who I guess you are able to emphasize with, or is that only yourself?) when they get in an accident? Is a cancer discovered at the prime of someone’s life “comormibidity”?
I am kind of tired of hearing that when ACTUAL DATA shows that vaccinated people transmit the virus just as well.
Yeah, it's not a binary problem but the reproduction rate drastically decreases with vaccine. Vaccinated people may transmit the virus, but they're less likely to get infected at the first moment AND less likely to spread. This is supported by ACTUAL DATA from everywhere, including Israel and Portugal.
really?
What's the fuzz about anti vaxxers always talking about "won't stop infection" or "stop the pandemic" - 1st this is not black and white - 2nd and nowhere I have seen that these are the actual arguments for these measures?
Seriously. Mitigating the damage from failure to contain and eradicate the virus when we had the chance (in the precious few early weeks where lockdowns had that potential, but guess what, the same people f'd that up) involves filter after filter after filter. Each filter reduces spread and severity by some amount. Masks reduce (but don't eliminate) transmission. Vaccines reduce (but don't eliminate) infections. Vaccines reduce the length of infection, reducing transmission. Lockdowns and social distancing reduce the spread. On and on. Every single measure is applying a filter that might only be 90% successful. That is no way a logical argument for no filter at all.
These people really don't understand how bad this pandemic would be if we had no mitigation measures at all. The entire hospital system would collapse and millions (more--probably tens of millions) would die. Yet that's what they constantly argue for. Yet forcing people to get a needle in their arm is "draconian".
We have enough data by now, worldwide, to clearly say that lockdowns were completely bullshit and ineffective. There is virtually no correlation with viral spread and lockdown status.
You're saying that ineffective, half-hearted lockdowns elsewhere were ineffective? Hold the phone.
Victoria, Australia. South Korea. Wuhan. New Zealand. Singapore.
These lockdowns eradicated the virus locally--for several months at a time; but they are precarious, leaky ships due to the virus spreading everywhere else. An effective worldwide lockdown was exponentially more difficult. But very large countries with the ability to isolate themselves from international travel did do effective lockdowns, so I will not be accepting your narrative above.
Careful now, very smart person, this blade has two very sharp edges.
2. Not having an entire generation and their aggregated centuries of experience wiped out is probably beneficial for the future of a society.
3. I am vaccinated and am going to get a booster this week because I am very smart.
Point 2 is false.
Point 3 is too vague to make any sense.
It won't stop infection. But it greatly reduces that rate and, above all, your risk of death and the strength of the disease in general in case you do catch it.
> Convince them that it's necessary to stop the pandemic without giving any arguments.
The argument should be very clear: vaccines are a known and easy way to make the virus a non-threat, or a small one at that.
To that end, you can see the numbers for yourself after vaccination started[1] and how greatly the number of deaths and cases has reduced.
[1] see for example Brazil since June till now: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/brazil/
> Have them defend your measures in public forums and feel very smart.
Given this is a place where IT Big Corp and govts. are constantly critized, I don't think anyone here is defending this as an WHO or any institution ass kisser
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why not fire people who drive cars - the risk of dying and killing other people is greater than Covid presents for most every age category...especially those ages that are working for Google. And you should be o.k. with that too.
Also haven't heard of just infecting others with obesity..
My risk of vehicular injury is not increased by being around you, even if you are a bad driver.
As for driving you are of course wrong, other bad drivers can affect your health.
Are there any studies on causation?
It's hilarious watching the "muh personal freedoms" people complain about private entities exercising their personal freedoms because it has bad overlap with their own. Either swallow the hard pills that come with "personal freedoms" or shut up about it.
And obesity doesn’t spike up at random intervals with enough extra hospitalisation to impede the healthcare system as a whole.
And obesity can’t be mostly prevented by getting a tiny low-risk jab in the arm every so often.
And they’re working on self driving cars precisely because it’s such a big cause of death, but those things are currently about as ready as a cure for aging. (As in: yes, but with huge caveats that make it a no in practice).
Completely reasonable to destroy someone's livelihood while they may not be at much risk of dying from the said disease?
Because, we are not even talking about preventing transmission at this point, in case you have not noticed. Vaccines only provide personal protection.
Herd immunity is still a thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But point taken.
There will be no end. If the virus mutates to become harmless, the mandates will be given all the credit, and we will double down on this system. It's not temporary.
It is puzzling that such "bypass of privacy / speech rights" was ferociously resisted by the some of same people who now applaud the "bypass of medical / physical integrity rights". Hey look, it's not us doing the violence and suspending basic human rights – it's the private companies!
I guess people need to see how this ugly pattern plays out in full, again. I anticipate a lot of future "How could they let this happen?" and "Nobody could have foreseen this!" as well as the sad classic, "Is there no one left to stand up for me?".
Anyway. Maybe in US/SV good jobs come easier (I'm in 2nd grade EU country) and thus you can see things clearer. Dunno
But if this seems so difficult I wonder how battling climate change will seem to us.
Definitely interesting times. Albeit dark.
“all civil rights” meaning you have full civil rights but can't force a private company to give you a job when you refuse to follow safety rules? Especially in a country where employers pay for healthcare it doesn't seem unreasonable to require a safe, easy, and highly effective means of avoiding very expensive treatments.
This is also far from unprecedented. I've worked at jobs which required other vaccinations, schools all around the country require a ton of vaccinations, and the people who don't want to do that for whatever reason have always had the option of homeschooling, finding another job, etc. If this is such an important issue to you, take responsibility for the consequences of your choice — there's certainly a long tradition of people accepting that as a cost of their religious decisions.
Regarding the status quo: Yes, mandates exist. The school example is a piece of paper you turn into the school office during enrollment and no one ever thinks about it again. It's not a status tracked in real time, apps don't have to be presented to enter buildings. And in most cases, people can file for exemptions if it really matters to them.
My friend started college in his late 30s and didn't have access to his childhood immunizations since it was so long ago. He had to get a blood test showing immunity before he could attend class.
Government mandating private business to inject their workers every 6 months to save face (and $$$) for the "vaccine" manufacturers is fascist and anti-human. Thankfully the over-arching Biden mandate probably won't go anywhere, but large companies such as Google are doing this as a political and financial move. NOT FOR HEALTH
When politics and money make it necessary for companies to coerce people into injections every 6 months, a constantly shifting definition of "vaccinated", then things should be re-evaluated. And if you believe in this garbage you should honestly re-evaluate your concept of liberty.
You don't have a civil right to employment at Google.
And I am free to kill you if you do.
It’s not a useful tool for an argument because anything can fall under that.
“Stop taking drugs because you’re harming society. You’re still free to take them though, you’ll just be put in jail. But it’s your choice.”
This is like the free speech debate. You have the right to say whatever you like. Other people don't have to put up with it by listening to you though. Just as if you don't get a vaccine, other people won't want to work with you.
Places like Brazil, some countries in Africa, Belarus.
A few exceptions are Sweden, Texas and Florida.
I wish I had the money to move to one of those 3 (I might land a job soon that might allow me to move to Florida very soon).
Might be able to spend 6 months in Florida and 6 months in Brazil, maybe a couple of months in my home country (south american, also not draconian and everything's open but we'll see about it in January).
Funny since the entire joke about going to Somalia to live in a free country has been a thing for roughly 30 years
Au contraire [1]. For example:
> During the Revolutionary War, by contrast, George Washington immunized his troops against smallpox even against their will.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-history-of-vaccine-man...
Maybe the shortage of competent developers will end one day but until then, there is a very competitive labor market for all technical people not just developers. In this market, workers are not required to come into an office therefore vaccination is not an issue.
If they act on the threat, it's at their own peril and other businesses will gain. It's not the end of civil rights though.
They are, in fact, extremely common. The first vaccine mandate in the US was in 1809.
Complain if you want, but don't base your complaints on blatant falsehoods.
- We got him now. We'll get these two first, then the others.
- What others? Wales and the kid are the last ones.
- Oh, no. Texas is full of rebels.
- Lots of work to do down in Texas.
- We get Josey Wales and it ends.
- Doing right ain't got no end.
On TV today I saw that Kroger employees don't get sick day pay if they are off because of COVID unless they have been vaccinated (and I would assume there's a medical exemption).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/nyregion/covid-vaccine-bl...
Edit: Added "young" adjective that was missing, point remains.
This is not what the article you’ve cited says.
(I am vaccinated please don't post hot takes about how I am a anti-vaxer.)
I am very much against the forced vaccinations of people, and I very much abhor what is happening in Canada (where I live) with the vaccine passports and the making of the unvaccinated second class citizens. But don't make the term racism a worthless term by using it for everything. It's counterproductive.
I say all this as a black Trinidadian immigrant that lives in Canada. I am vaccinated myself, but many black people I know are not.
I am saying though, that if you unilaterally denied COVID care to non-vaccinated patients, that would be the equivalent of denying service to ~70% of "young black people," which would be easy bait for people calling that racist. Which is why the health system probably won't do it.
If it was a policy that's based on something that the Black people can't change about them (e.g. refusal to entry to a club based on your address, with majority black areas of town being in that list), and it disadvantages them, yes that'd be racist. But in this case, the Black people (or whoever) can easily change it by getting vaxed...
Regarding the latter, it's not difficult to create a policy that's non-racist in construction, but has reliably racist results. Correlated parameters, etc. Whether anything can or should be done about it is a thornier question.
There's lately though talk about unvaccinated COVID patients bearing the cost nonetheless. Note that public health system is for free.
In my country (also EU) the public health system is most definitely not "free". It is paid for by a universal tax called (insidiously and inaccurately) "health insurance".
> There's lately though talk about unvaccinated COVID patients bearing the cost nonetheless.
Calls for true insurance (individualized, based on actual health and habits) are completely infeasible for political reasons.
What I can see happening is the existing mandatory health tax PLUS extra payments for non-grata groups. Some constitutional changes may be needed, but since all the right people would profit (extra $$$), that's just a technical detail in this day and age.
1. public health system will take care of you to its abilities (which to a large extent are defined by the taxation yes)
2. no private insurer is paying or covering anything COVID-related and they never did
3. been trying to get private insurance on top of the public one and I'm told time and again that a few systems of mine will be excluded (i.e. they won't insure me for anything bearing the remotest possibility of actually needing them for). Also that I am too old to start now...
if anything is clear from the COVID story in my mind is that we need a better and more capable public health system. Private healthcare is not about health or care.
Isn’t that the argument?
I have never seen a person trying hard to get vaccinated with available vaccines all around them unable to do so. I have seen people attempt to lose weight. The fact that it’s big business is a testament to this.
Sexual behavior, well yea there is careless behavior but also deceit. How would you tell the difference?
With vaccines, the end goal is to get people to get the vaccine so they can live their normal lives. There is no one time simple action someone can take to prevent obesity. There is no vaccine for all stds I’m aware of.
For example, a smoker who is not actively engaged in a smoking cessation program or someone who is morbidly obese by choice and not actively engaged in a medical weight loss program should be paying higher health-insurance premiums to offset their increased costs. (The former is not uncommon and while the latter may be controversial it is not necessarily a niche perspective. [1])
So yes, I think the same logic should apply to individuals who choose not to receive vaccines.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19548556/
Insurance companies have to toe the thin line between a business and a social good. With prediction models to become more and more accurate I would be happier if we have non-profit insurance that amortizes/socializes the draw of the lottery. For voluntary choices of risky behavior, drug addiction, unsafe sex, etc etc., I think insurance companies are within their rights to charge more.
Will health insurers deny claims related to cancer if you have been drinking alcohol? Good luck living in that world.
So yes, one would expect to be in their commercial interest to deny cancer claims to people who willingly put themselves at excessive risk of cancer at some point in the future. It's the infinite wisdom of the free market!
I'm not aware of any other risky behaviors that exclude coverage, so this would be a precedent.
Do you think it's unfair that smokers pay more for life insurance?
> Quitting alcohol is nowhere as easy as getting covid vaccines
you have a choice to buy the next bottle or not, as far as I know. It's not like addiction is unavoidable. And cancer risk for alcohol consumption is not even related to addiction, you increase your risk of cancer significantly even with a small, non-zero consumption of alcohol. Look at the data.
IMO this sentiment is just another manifestation of the overwhelming desire to punish the unvaccinated, rather than being based on clear thinking.
... but yes, they definitely already do similar things to influence customer behavior (such as discounts on weight loss programs).
https://twitter.com/bupauk/status/1368841967086473216
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExeyKpEW8AEDAdg?format=jpg&name=...
No one's rights are being violated here. If you don't want to get vaccinated, you can. But those choices come with consequences, like just about every other choice we make.
It's worth noting that fully remote people won't fall under this policy (from my reading of it anyway) so this isn't a blanket policy.
It's also worth noting that a whole bunch of vaccines are required to attend public school already [2].
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/masterpiece-colorado...
[2]: https://www.health.ny.gov/prevention/immunization/schools/sc...
You realize this is a contradiction, right?
We all know how that turned out.
What about the rest of our modern scientific knowledge base? Gravity. Electromagnetism. Chemistry. Biology. There are entire swathes of disciplines that are well nailed down by results, and used daily as though they were fact. Because they work reliably.
So I'm going to call BS on the idea that science can't be conclusive because of the definition of the scientific method. It's arguing in bad faith to point at the 1% and ignore the 99%.
And that's exactly what GP was stating, which is why parent's quip against an out of context quote was unreasonably pedantic.
But personally, I'm pretty damn thankful for their sacrifice so that we live in a largely polio-free world today.
I'm not sure when "what you can do for your country" got so small that people aren't willing to take the minuscule risk of vaccination side effects in order to gift the substantial benefit to their neighbors. Used to be, selfishness like that made you an asshole.
I say this as someone who is vaccinated and encourages others to be so as well.
It's very close to what is called Hobson's Choice (take it or leave it, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Hobson's%20choice..., but it's really closer to Harvey's (Weinstein's) Bargain, where you are free to join him or not and if you don't, the part goes to someone else. It's not quite a quid-pro-quo, as the threat is to take something from you that you already have.
Companies appear free to offer Hobson's Choice, except they haven't been up until now, and the pandemic narrative has provided air cover for a political purity purge. Anyone who is sceptical of the internal passport system the vax is being used to implement probably isn't a culture fit at a platform company anyway, and they should talk to an employment lawyer about their options for getting a settlement for constructive dismissal.
Otherwise, you can't argue with a nihilist position, as it uses discourse to filter people through a lens of alignment to power and narrative, and has no interest in reconciling to truth.
Vaccines required at school while children don't get any kind of side effects of COVID19 anyway (and get more risks from the vaccine than anything else). This is so far from any kind of Science.
Other than dying [1] you mean?
Dying aside, children can still spread the virus. I’m sure someone will make the straw man argument of “the vaccine doesn’t 100% prevent transmission”, which is true but no one claimed it did. It does however improve the situation.
[1]: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b...
https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
But should it?
rights are are social constructs created by people, we are as such allowed to re-evaluate them, unless you are speaking in a specific context of law/convention(s).
Also, wrt to that [1]; refusing customer business and firing employees are entirely different things, even if they both fit the description "business autonomy".
2. I can't believe people still parrot the "choice with consequences" argument. If abortion is persecuted in Texas, is that just a choice with consequences? The only premise that matters is whether threatening someones livelihood -- which is quite frankly a nuclear option -- is a fair and proportional response.
3. Last but not least, vaccine precedents cut both ways. Measles and smallpox don't mutate and require new vaccines. Covid does. Measles and smallpox don't discriminate by age. Covid does. Measles and smallpox vaccines don't have notable adverse effects on young people. The Covid vaccine does.
Covid has little in common with measles and smallpox, which are mandated. It does however have a lot in common with the flu, both the disease and the vaccine, which is not mandated in schools nor hospitals.
This definition and example of using it in a sentence were ironically provided by Google search.
Intelligent or otherwise, why would Google or any company want to retain anti-authoritarian staff?
Understanding statistics behind vaccines requires some general understanding of setting up controlled experiments (vs just looking at some numbers, like ratio of vaccinated vs unvaccinated people in hospitals without controlling for age).
Generally more intelligent people have a better understanding of statistics, and Google uses a way of intelligence test to hire people (even if that is unpopular here on HN).
To address the risk of transmission for in-person employees, would a combination of masking and testing be similarly effective at minimizing office outbreaks?
As for the increase in a company's health insurance costs it seems like we could simply let health insurance companies consider vaccination status when calculating an individual's health insurance premiums (like they currently do with smokers). It seems like the reasonable free-market approach to ask people to pay for any increase in risk they willingly choose to take on.
If I'm in my late 20s or early 30s and in great shape and eat healthy, a vaccine is not going to make a difference in personal risk. If anything, vaccine rates should be used by a company when getting health insurance benefits for the org as a whole.
Assuming that's true then I'd expect your health insurance premiums to remain similar regardless of your vaccination status. I didn't mean to argue that people who are unvaccinated should be charged more, I meant to argue that vaccination status should be added as a sixth factor that health insurance companies are legally allowed to use to set premiums. (The ACA already allows them to consider things like tobacco use and age.)
> If anything, vaccine rates should be used by a company when getting health insurance benefits for the org as a whole.
Seems reasonable. If it results in cost increases for the company it would be up to the company to decide how to pass that on to employees. (I.e. should everyone pay a little more, just the unvaccinated, or should the company eat the cost?)
The median age of Covid mortality is 80.
Think about that.
Hasn’t it always been the case that younger people vaccinate to help keep the older protected?
Also, you don’t need to die of Covid to be placed in a hospital. Fewer available beds affects everyone.
No, polio for example.
> Also, you don’t need to die of Covid to be placed in a hospital. Fewer available beds affects everyone.
"Collective ownership and harm" is not an unrestricted pass for universal mandates. Everything is connected, every action you take affects someone else. Driving for example puts everyone at risk. Not just on the road but also carbon emissions. Where do we draw the line? Wherever the line is, it should be data driven. Just like mortality, hospitalizations are strongly skewed by age.
https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/dashboa...
According to Ohio data, people under 50 (2/3 of the population) account for ~20% of covid-related hospitalizations.
Consider also the data towards the bottom: Total bed capacity.
Out of 100% capacity, 63% are non-covid patients, and 18% are covid related.
If we apply our 20% hospitalization rate to 18% covid beds, we get.. 4%.
4% of total beds will be occupied by people with covid under 50.
Is 4% the difference between collapse or not?
This number could double, or even triple, and we would still have over 10% of beds available.
There was a time and place when there was a real risk of disaster. We did our lockdowns, our social distancing, and we vaccinated a ton of people.
Now it's time to start thinking about moving past covid, and getting back to normal life.
No, no it is not yet.
I am referring to Covid-19-Omicron:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59677070
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2021/dec/15/uk-cov...
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-big-numbers-of-coronavir...
If you're not in the UK, then congratulations, you have time, days to weeks, before this comes your way.
I think you and I just fundamentally see the world differently, so I'll just cut to the chase of how I see omicron, because I'm sure you see it the exact opposite way.
From what I've learned about omicron so far, it A. transmits very fast B. has high immune escape, and C. has a low incidence of severe outcome relative to other variants.
To me this sounds like a good thing as far as ending the pandemic goes. We want a highly transmissible, benign variant, agreed?
the safety trials had no control group, the approval was based on 4 months of data, the situation that we are in now seems to suggest they dont really work very well, there certainly is no long term data about what happens when you keep reinjecting boosters over and over, lipid nanoparticles themselves are a novel technology that is not very well understood, most people are at low risk and have no need for it, the list goes on