I don't think the people putting these mandates in place appreciate the emotional harm it causes employees. My relationship with my employer went from something slightly positive to pretty negative after just one threatening email. This kind of thing combined with working from home makes finding motivation so much more difficult. It's all subconscious too, and it's much stronger than I would have expected.
I wish my employer _had_ instituted a vaccine mandate, and I'm disappointed in seeing Google reneging on theirs.
It would have improved my relationship with my employer, increasing my trust in them. I've been disappointing in their slowness to respond to a public health crisis.
Care/harm is not the only moral that exists. Many people think it’s just as immoral to force individuals to inject something into themselves in order to remain employed.
You don't have a moral right to spreading of a deadly disease onto your coworkers (which you may be doing knowingly or not, with much higher probability if you're unvaxed). So you either accept rules that are acceptable to the affected people around you, or stay away from others.
This isn’t the goal of the vaccine. You can and probably will still get mildly ill with newer variants and remain contagious. Vaccination will prevent you from getting seriously ill.
Many people should stop listening to the blathering of right-wing idiots and get with the public health programs of the past century.
Forcing a vax mandate on everyone isn’t fair to people who are genuinely at risk if vaccinated, but the alternative should be WFH where possible or that you move to a different job if WFH physically won’t work. This is literally a public health crisis.
There is a libertarian argument that this is bad for individual liberty, and I am also sympathetic to that. We generally give up some liberty in exchange for living in a society with other people. I can’t walk around my place of employment naked and smoking a blunt without getting fired. You can argue that that’s wrong too, and if so that would mean you’re not a hypocrite, congrats, I salute you.
1. Piss off the anti-vaxxers by having a mandate.
2. Piss off everyone else by giving in to a paranoid fringe.
They did not solve this problem, they just moved it around into a more complicated form. Instead of dealing with people who want to stay remote so they don't have to follow the mandate, it's going to start with someone who has an immunocompromised family member and discovers an unvaccinated person on their team came to work with a cough.
Believe it or not, but there are quite a few people who are very much pro vaccine and have taken the covid vaccine that are opposed to the mandate. The idea that anybody who does not support a mandate is anti vax is ridiculous. The majority of the people I have talked to about the mandate who have taken the vaccine are opposed to it.
I'm finding myself similarly... Feel free to gloss over this, I'm processing if nothing else.
I made my own decision early on that vaccination wasn't significant for me. I had been exposed [and a very mild case] due to forced travel during that window where we knew COVID existed, but acted like it had not yet entered the country.
Natural immunity plus the fact that I live alone, never go out, and have been remote since before the pandemic... it wasn't a high priority for me. I felt reasonably safe and unlikely to spread it should it find me again.
It was all to comply with federal mandates for contractors - my employer decided that this should apply to all [including remote] employees.
It was more than a little inconvenient going out of my way to get vaccinated for arguably little gain. I might even say added risk in my case.
The reporting process alone made me miss several deadlines. Asinine things like not being able to confirm my vaccination status until it sat in my veins for two weeks.
In the early days I was all for it, especially when it looked like vaccinated people would not be spreading this thing, but more recently we have devolved completely into irrational hygiene theater. The mandates will not move the needle and serve no purpose at this time.
Same here - I was all for it, encouraged many people at risk to get ahead of it.
Your comment combined with mine made me realize... I (and the people I work with) played a big part in this theater.
As a federal contractor, when the federal mandate came down... those employees had to be vaccinated. The employer conveniently pushed this policy to the other 200k+ employees.
It was all a scheme to boost the vaccination rates and push this cart along faster -- the results never mattered.
It facilitated this... 'everything is normal/okay, the unvaccinated are the ones to blame' narrative.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when we fired all of the unvaccinated nurses amid the Omicron spike, and then CDC lowered the quarantine to 5 days and hospitals made sick workers come to work. So yes, let's fire folks that want to work, but force sick (contagious) people into work. It makes 0 sense.
May I extend a big "Thank you" to you and GP for recognizing and admitting this. You have now contributed to the restoration of trust in society in a great way. At least for me, personally :)
To be clear, you were in the full right to choose whatever treatment you wanted for whatever reason. The blame here is squarely on those who threw the wrong reason (threat of force) into the mix - they should have thought more about unintended consequences of their mandates.
These people don't understand public health. The point of the mandate is to make it faster for us to transition to endemic Covid. Once immunity rates are high enough, the healthcare impact of Covid becomes equivalent to the healthcare impact of seasonal flu. Without a mandate, you have to continue to deal with a pandemic until enough people get natural immunity, which is very costly, or until supply of treatments is sufficient, incurring the cost of pandemic measures on the economy the entire time. After the government exhausted its incentive policies for increasing vaccination-based immunity, the only policy left is mandate, the threat of which worked to get us to where we are today.
Mandates had nothing to do with that. Proper education and information helped the UK to achieve good vaccination update especially among elderly while many countries with strict mandates lagged behind.
Vaccine mandates however can caused considerable friction in the society. Just see Canadian convoy protests with hundreds of millions of damages.
It's far too late to educate people who are 40+ who gobble up misinformation. The "friction" in society comes from this uneducated group. If you have a proposal for educating these people to get them to vaccinate, the world's public health agencies are all ears.
Vaccine mandates and the threat of vaccine mandates in the US in particular have successfully driven up vaccination rates and allowed removal of pandemic restrictions earlier than would have been possible otherwise.
This view is wrong and that is the primary cause of problems with antivax.
The studies show that giving better information helps to undecided. Whereas vaccine mandates do not help much for staunch antivax.
The real world example (for example, the UK) also shows this in practice. No vaccine mandates are really needed to ensure high vaccination rates.
Vaccine mandates may have improved vaccination rates in certain groups but those groups are not most at risk. The total impact on vaccination rates and public health may even be negative as with more elderly have refused vaccine due to mandates than without the mandates.
> the healthcare impact of Covid becomes equivalent to the healthcare impact of seasonal flu
Unfortunately, and again, I agree with what you wrote, but I think we're going to find out that COVID is and will continue to be much worse than the flu and maintain an ongoing strain on the hospital system. Being endemic has nothing to do with how mild or destructive a disease is, just its prevalence. For example, the spread of HIV has done nothing to reduce its virulence or ultimate death rate (it's still near 100% fatal, we just have better anti-virals now). COVID is going to be a slow burn on society, raising death rates and debilitating side effects for years, maybe decades. We aren't going back to 2019 for a loooong time.
That's good to hear! The best possible endgame is if all the people who oppose the mandate got the vaccine and just oppose the mandate on principle.
I've heard from other offices that tried to go that route, have a decent percentage of people who declined vaccination, and are now having these problems.
Google is interested in reducing employment costs. A vaccine mandate makes sense when supply of Covid treatments is low. When supply of Covid treatments is no longer constrained (due to a combination of high enough vaccination rate and high enough supply of treatment), the cost of enforcing the mandate is higher than the cost of Covid.
It's really unfortunate that vaccines got sucked into the culture war / tribalism / political divides. That meant that a dialogue about risks and benefits of deploying a response to a public health crisis got tinged with distrust, anger, and division in a way unprecedented in modern times. What I've seen is that it's raised the temperature of every interaction to anticipate the worst possible response and preemptively defend against it. Threatening emails without provocation sound a bit like that dynamic. It sucks for everyone. But it's hard to de-escalate.
It's trivial to de-escalate for WFH companies at least; We agreed last century that forced medical treatment was wrong. Don't do that and people can hold whatever opinions they like about the vaccine individually.
Expecting that your ideological opponents to completely back down in order to de-escalate is not de-escalation. De-escalation is incremental and generally done in small lock-steps, with all parties relaxing their postures, not by asserting polarizing and simplistic absolutes and expecting to "win". What you wrote above is part of the dynamic that prevents de-escalation.
At the company I work at, the HR EVP said on an internal videocast, 'if $CEO makes the decision for you to be vaccinated, then you'll have to be vaccinated' which really came across as imperious.
Why should the CEO be making medical decisions for 1000s of employees?
> Why should the CEO be making medical decisions for 1000s of employees?
I would not choose to work with selfish colleagues, who don't know or care about their medical decisions causing harm to others (or the burden they potentially place on the medical system; the data is clear vaccinations reduce the severity of a COVID infection from ICU worth to something more benign). It's company culture (with regards to company leadership mandating vaccination).
Citigroup employs over 200k workers, and lost less than 2k who refused vaccination [1]. The only employers this would impact would be smaller employers who predominately employ those against vaccination.
TLDR Why would I not want to work for a CEO who cares about public health, as well as the welfare of others and myself by mandating a proven safe vaccine? This is what leadership looks like.
I'm glad the mandates are being lifted. They no longer serve purpose. Maybe they did for a brief moment, but now there's little benefit to the greater good by imposing vaccines that don't do much to curb the spread.
Personally, this pandemic strongly illuminated why the United States is on its path to a failed social fabric, the likelihood of turning the ship around (low), and personally, that a large proportion of my fellow citizens/residents are not "my people" (the collective "us" versus "me, me, me"); it solidified my plans to expatriate somewhere with stronger social fabric and support of a shared common/greater good. More power to those who stick around while Rome burns.
Western Europe. Temperate climate, national healthcare, stable government, walkable communities by default with affordable housing, quality intentional infrastructure, far less violent crime, a better future for my kids.
Why would a mandate depend on employment? Shouldn't a public health issue be dealt with by public health measures?
The reality, as we have now seen, is that vaccine mandates of an experimental approval drug are unlawful at the federal level.
Thus attempts to have companies do it in a patchwork fashion were an attempt to end-run the issue (yes my employer does a huge amount of government related business).
>Why would I not want to work for a CEO who cares about public health, as well as the welfare of others and myself by mandating a proven safe vaccine? This is what leadership looks like.
It simply boils to if you think the ends justify the means. Does having the power to compel someone mean that you should compel them. I get that people have different opinions on what is the appropriate use of power and influence over others. I tend to favor leaders who try to inform, enable, and change people's minds rather than use punishments to make people do something they otherwise wouldn't.
That is to say, I like being offered the carrot opposed to the stick.
Could you explain a bit about what lead to the emotional harm? I'm not sure if it was the threatening email or not -- if the email had been as non-threatening as possible, yet a mandate was still put in place, would you have felt the same or not? (And what exactly was in the email?)
Any unwanted medical procedure, regardless of what exactly that procedure entails, is a form of bodily molestation and bodily violation.
We should expect somebody being coerced by an authority figure to undergo an unwanted medical procedure, especially when that individual's livelihood is being threatened, to find it to be an emotionally traumatic experience, regardless of how severe the coercion is.
The situation can easily be made worse when the procedure may have unknown harmful side effects, and when it comes out of the blue.
I can only speak for myself, but it certainly impacted my relationship with my employer. Aside from it feeling intrusive into my personal health choices, It seemed to be an extreme ultimatum that reframed the power dynamic and how they valued me as an employee.
An apt analogy would be if your husband/wife threatens divorce because you left socks on the floor. Even if you don't mind picking them up, or were planning to already, it is shocking and damaging that they would go straight to the nuclear option.
Flip-flopping on the issue almost makes it worse. If you were willing to fire/divorce me yesterday, and don't care about the issue today, how much do you really value me and our ongoing partnership.
> If you were willing to fire/divorce me yesterday, and don't care about the issue today, how much do you really value me and our ongoing partnership
they never cared. You can like your job, you can love it. You can feel valued and like you contribute but its just a job, and they will drop you faster than you'll drop them.
Yeah, I totally get that. Everyone is replaceable. It is just a new information that my job is much less secure and valued than I thought. Despite the truth of this, surely you can understand that it can be detrimental to morale. I always knew that I can wake up any day and be out of a job, but normally feel that this is very unlikely. This type of corporate Behavior makes me feel like it is more likely then I thought
Vaccine mandates were always about preventing transmission. There isn't great data yet, but Omicron seems pretty good at infecting vaccinated people, so I suspect people with breakthrough cases still transmit it somewhat well. Santa Clara county is heavily vaccinated, but Omicron was still its biggest wave by far.
Pre-Delta, mandates made sense (though the vaccines came too late for this to ever be practical). With Delta, the case was shakier. With Omicron, they're really only effective at preventing severe disease. That's huge for saving lives, not so much for preventing transmission.
Eh? Vaccine effectiveness at preventing transmission dropped off precipitously with each new variant. Is your suggestion that preventing in-job transmission was not the purported purpose of workplace Covid vaccine mandates?
They are not but the group premiums are deals cut with every business so businesses are incentivized to promote employee health to cut down in their premiums.
Because the deal needs to be renegotiated periodically. The deal may also include incentive structures for continued health initiatives and may include some cost sharing between the company and the insurer.
2nd hand knowledge from MS employee friends. If you don't have a vaccine you can still go to office as long as you wear a mask and take a test every 3 weeks. Not sure how that's enforced (or even if it's enforceable).
If there is a private-sector vaccine mandate, and there is an adverse reaction, they will be sued. If there is no private-sector mandate, and there is an outbreak, they will be sued.
So the employers are between a rock a hard place. Government needs to do one or the other.
Would somebody win a lawsuit if a company doesn't force a vaccine and somebody gets sick? I don't think any major company requires a flu vaccine and I haven't heard anybody winning a lawsuit about getting the flu. As far as I know even when people die from the flu they haven't successful sued a company over it.
Plenty of employers have private sector vaccine mandates already. I’ve been current in many vaccines you have probably lapsed in because of this policy of my employer.
How close do you think we are to "Men In Black" mind erase devices. I think if I could blank out the last year at least I'd be much healthier mentally.
would like companies to allows proof of covid antibodies for those who have natural immunity. CDC released a chart showing that natural inoculation is slightly more effective than just the vaccine w/ no natural immunity (vaccine + natural immunity being most effective by tiny margin). [1]
Natural immunity also lasts longer than the vaccine, no booster required for at least a year, data is showing up to 2 years.
The self-attestation that companies require for in-office work should change from "I have received the Covid vaccine" to "I am inoculated against Covid".
I've thought about this "acceptance" of natural immunity idea (a lot). I came to the personal conclusion that I'd rather not have another burden to my employment whatsoever. Frig off my health concerns work, go on get off of it, get on out.
The CDC figure shows that it is quite reasonable to change mandates to: you must be vaccinated OR have natural immunity from prior exposure.
With the vast majority of most populations falling into one of those two categories, we no longer have to worry about a large bump in hospitalizations due to people intentionally exposing themselves to the virus. The scientific rationales for maintaining the vaccine-only mandates are dwindling rapidly.
I think there is still uncertainty as to how long the "natural immunity" lasts. I haven't seen any data that backs up what you've claimed. From what i've seen its pretty inconsistent person to person compared to the vaccine.
Considering how easy and available the vaccine is, i don't understand the issue with requiring the vax over natural immunity. While its healthy to debate about the science, the reality is that a lot of the covid discussion is just the american culture war, and thin scientific data is being co-opted to prove some point du jour
I don't think natural inoculation should have to provide more proof than the vaccine. Many just wanted to send a paternalistic message so people don't voluntary infect themselves instead of getting vaccinated. I doubt there is more behind it.
Are companies still allowing permanent remote work? Google, Microsoft, etc. I don't care about the vaccine mandates as much as whether or not they force people to go into the office
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 2439 ms ] threadIt would have improved my relationship with my employer, increasing my trust in them. I've been disappointing in their slowness to respond to a public health crisis.
Forcing a vax mandate on everyone isn’t fair to people who are genuinely at risk if vaccinated, but the alternative should be WFH where possible or that you move to a different job if WFH physically won’t work. This is literally a public health crisis.
There is a libertarian argument that this is bad for individual liberty, and I am also sympathetic to that. We generally give up some liberty in exchange for living in a society with other people. I can’t walk around my place of employment naked and smoking a blunt without getting fired. You can argue that that’s wrong too, and if so that would mean you’re not a hypocrite, congrats, I salute you.
Was and could be again. Not “is.”
1. Piss off the anti-vaxxers by having a mandate. 2. Piss off everyone else by giving in to a paranoid fringe.
They did not solve this problem, they just moved it around into a more complicated form. Instead of dealing with people who want to stay remote so they don't have to follow the mandate, it's going to start with someone who has an immunocompromised family member and discovers an unvaccinated person on their team came to work with a cough.
I made my own decision early on that vaccination wasn't significant for me. I had been exposed [and a very mild case] due to forced travel during that window where we knew COVID existed, but acted like it had not yet entered the country.
Natural immunity plus the fact that I live alone, never go out, and have been remote since before the pandemic... it wasn't a high priority for me. I felt reasonably safe and unlikely to spread it should it find me again.
It was all to comply with federal mandates for contractors - my employer decided that this should apply to all [including remote] employees.
It was more than a little inconvenient going out of my way to get vaccinated for arguably little gain. I might even say added risk in my case.
The reporting process alone made me miss several deadlines. Asinine things like not being able to confirm my vaccination status until it sat in my veins for two weeks.
Your comment combined with mine made me realize... I (and the people I work with) played a big part in this theater.
As a federal contractor, when the federal mandate came down... those employees had to be vaccinated. The employer conveniently pushed this policy to the other 200k+ employees.
It was all a scheme to boost the vaccination rates and push this cart along faster -- the results never mattered.
It facilitated this... 'everything is normal/okay, the unvaccinated are the ones to blame' narrative.
Woefully lacking in attention in so many ways
May I extend a big "Thank you" to you and GP for recognizing and admitting this. You have now contributed to the restoration of trust in society in a great way. At least for me, personally :)
To be clear, you were in the full right to choose whatever treatment you wanted for whatever reason. The blame here is squarely on those who threw the wrong reason (threat of force) into the mix - they should have thought more about unintended consequences of their mandates.
Vaccine mandates however can caused considerable friction in the society. Just see Canadian convoy protests with hundreds of millions of damages.
Vaccine mandates and the threat of vaccine mandates in the US in particular have successfully driven up vaccination rates and allowed removal of pandemic restrictions earlier than would have been possible otherwise.
The studies show that giving better information helps to undecided. Whereas vaccine mandates do not help much for staunch antivax.
The real world example (for example, the UK) also shows this in practice. No vaccine mandates are really needed to ensure high vaccination rates.
Vaccine mandates may have improved vaccination rates in certain groups but those groups are not most at risk. The total impact on vaccination rates and public health may even be negative as with more elderly have refused vaccine due to mandates than without the mandates.
I think you're discounting an incredibly powerful distortion field created by malevolent misinformation by some very sick and confused people.
> the healthcare impact of Covid becomes equivalent to the healthcare impact of seasonal flu
Unfortunately, and again, I agree with what you wrote, but I think we're going to find out that COVID is and will continue to be much worse than the flu and maintain an ongoing strain on the hospital system. Being endemic has nothing to do with how mild or destructive a disease is, just its prevalence. For example, the spread of HIV has done nothing to reduce its virulence or ultimate death rate (it's still near 100% fatal, we just have better anti-virals now). COVID is going to be a slow burn on society, raising death rates and debilitating side effects for years, maybe decades. We aren't going back to 2019 for a loooong time.
I've heard from other offices that tried to go that route, have a decent percentage of people who declined vaccination, and are now having these problems.
It's trivial to de-escalate for WFH companies at least; We agreed last century that forced medical treatment was wrong. Don't do that and people can hold whatever opinions they like about the vaccine individually.
And yet require vaccines for large part of life pre-covid with no prior complaints.
Why should the CEO be making medical decisions for 1000s of employees?
I would not choose to work with selfish colleagues, who don't know or care about their medical decisions causing harm to others (or the burden they potentially place on the medical system; the data is clear vaccinations reduce the severity of a COVID infection from ICU worth to something more benign). It's company culture (with regards to company leadership mandating vaccination).
Citigroup employs over 200k workers, and lost less than 2k who refused vaccination [1]. The only employers this would impact would be smaller employers who predominately employ those against vaccination.
TLDR Why would I not want to work for a CEO who cares about public health, as well as the welfare of others and myself by mandating a proven safe vaccine? This is what leadership looks like.
[1] https://nypost.com/2022/01/14/citigroup-hits-99-percent-comp...
You've been demanding vaccination etc for those diseases as well, right?
The reality, as we have now seen, is that vaccine mandates of an experimental approval drug are unlawful at the federal level.
Thus attempts to have companies do it in a patchwork fashion were an attempt to end-run the issue (yes my employer does a huge amount of government related business).
Except thats being attacked too. Sometimes private "market forces" are easier than government.
> vaccine mandates of an experimental approval drug
Not experiemental.
> unlawful at the federal level.
Unlawful for a federal employer to require, not unlawful.
It simply boils to if you think the ends justify the means. Does having the power to compel someone mean that you should compel them. I get that people have different opinions on what is the appropriate use of power and influence over others. I tend to favor leaders who try to inform, enable, and change people's minds rather than use punishments to make people do something they otherwise wouldn't.
That is to say, I like being offered the carrot opposed to the stick.
We should expect somebody being coerced by an authority figure to undergo an unwanted medical procedure, especially when that individual's livelihood is being threatened, to find it to be an emotionally traumatic experience, regardless of how severe the coercion is.
The situation can easily be made worse when the procedure may have unknown harmful side effects, and when it comes out of the blue.
An apt analogy would be if your husband/wife threatens divorce because you left socks on the floor. Even if you don't mind picking them up, or were planning to already, it is shocking and damaging that they would go straight to the nuclear option.
Flip-flopping on the issue almost makes it worse. If you were willing to fire/divorce me yesterday, and don't care about the issue today, how much do you really value me and our ongoing partnership.
they never cared. You can like your job, you can love it. You can feel valued and like you contribute but its just a job, and they will drop you faster than you'll drop them.
Pre-Delta, mandates made sense (though the vaccines came too late for this to ever be practical). With Delta, the case was shakier. With Omicron, they're really only effective at preventing severe disease. That's huge for saving lives, not so much for preventing transmission.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Given that your employer is also your health insurer its in their interest to prevent severe disease and death as well.
Is this really true? I thought American employers paid the group insurance premium on their employees behalf to the actual insurance companies
Is every org running its own insurance business too?
They just need a headcount for office space. There have been a lot of new hires in the last two years.
So the employers are between a rock a hard place. Government needs to do one or the other.
I'm getting old...
Natural immunity also lasts longer than the vaccine, no booster required for at least a year, data is showing up to 2 years.
The self-attestation that companies require for in-office work should change from "I have received the Covid vaccine" to "I am inoculated against Covid".
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm#F1_down
With the vast majority of most populations falling into one of those two categories, we no longer have to worry about a large bump in hospitalizations due to people intentionally exposing themselves to the virus. The scientific rationales for maintaining the vaccine-only mandates are dwindling rapidly.
Considering how easy and available the vaccine is, i don't understand the issue with requiring the vax over natural immunity. While its healthy to debate about the science, the reality is that a lot of the covid discussion is just the american culture war, and thin scientific data is being co-opted to prove some point du jour
>SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4